Maintenance Mergences Miscellaneous
by Quillon42
Summary: A new collection of stories relating to characters and situations from Dead Rising 2.   I will be adding a few more stories to my DR1 collection, "Airduct Anecdotes Anthology," hopefully within the coming months as well.
1. Chuck's Cageyness

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "CHUCK'S CAGEYNESS AND THE WHOLE KEIJI MESS"

Only another thirty-five minutes or so, and the military brass were coming to get them all. It was the fourth day that Chuck Greene and the others had been cooped up in the safehouse…well, at least the most of them, with Chuck itinerantly speeding about from place to place in Fortune to get more and more of them. Just a few items were all Chuck needed at this point, and he could huff on back to the safehouse safe and sound once again. It was just a matter of getting the necessary PP.

No, not Prestige Points.

Or that _other_ PP, either (matters are contaminated enough as is, what with casinoloads of zombies milling and moaning around…let's keep the dirtiness down, shall we?)

See, over the course of the last three or four days he had obtained the necessary means for his daughter's survival through pharmaceutical, paramedical, postal, and plump-paunchy-pudgy-portly-person-al (ie Richard Kelly) means.

PP, to Chuck, meant "P_ Procurement"…all for the sake of picking up Zombrex.

Chuck was indeed inventing his very own lexicon while here in Fortune City…"p(a)wnage" could, yes, refer to his perennial pouncing upon unsuspecting undead…but it would, more prominently in his near future, mean a jaunt to the nearest pawnshop—looters, looming more creepily, honestly, than a humvee full of zombies—the next kind of "P" he would probably need to deal with, he'd figured, in order for him to score his fifth dosage of Zombrex for his beloved daughter.

And oh, how utterly, unimaginably grateful that precocious Katey Greene was.

Sending her father out to accumulate a whole plush menagerie for her—the blue donkey, the brown bull, the pink elephant—even after he had secured nothing less than a live flesh and blood Bengali tiger for her as her very own pet.

Yes, in this small control environment full of flesh-devouring creatures from casino to casino, there was nothing like a giant carnivorous predator to put a once-munched-upon-already single-digit-aged daughter at ease.

And yet, Katey would look up at Chuck reassuringly from her position on the cat-cohabitated-couch, waving her zombie-bite-scarred arm at him as she ran her hand up and down Snowflake's fur, the latter purring back, satisfied.

When Chuck had brought the sizeable synthetic animals, Katey started getting them all in a semicircle, then carrying them here and there and such. The harried hero figured she was trying to emulate him, imitating her father in pantomimes of rescues to get survivors to safety.

But then, a straggler grab or so later, he'd come back to Katey: "Daddy, I heard Jacob say something 'bout giant dice out in the casino outside our safehouse…"

And then a couple of runs after this, during which he'd procured said die…oh, Katey and her fluffy animals were in a configuration alright.

But it wasn't about search and rescue.

"Come on, seven!" he'd heard his daughter say, to the bewilderment of Sullivan and others around, in the space near the bathrooms. He then caught sight of her…and the huge bumbling red die she was pushing around…and the donkey and the bull and the elephant, with about two or three hundred in cash at the foot of each.

And about $10,000 right next to the telltale "Puff Puff" backpack lying on the end.

"I gave her some scratch for play money," explained Janus, elbowing Chuck playfully. "I figured, what the hell."

_What the hell, indeed,_ Chuck thought, wondering really what the hell was happening to his daughter. Besides nearly missing "turning" every morning.

When she grew bored of this, she'd left the beastly runner-ups to the mercy of Snowflake, who'd welcomed them with open jaws in their new capacity as his newest chew toys.

Now it was another several hours later, with only a little while to go before the soldiers' splashdown. Our hero was still pushing through Palisades, planning to go the long way and not take Linette's jaunty shortcut out of a need to stock up on a variety of foods for himself, Stacey, Rebecca, Sullivan, Richard, Stuart, Vikki, Randolph, Royce, Walter, and yes of course his daughter. As Chuck pressed forward, pacing past the Shanks, he thought about the several conversations he'd had with Katey since her unbecoming craps rout.

Chuck recalled that, many hours ago, he was in the room with Stacey and Snowflake, taking the three-minute (in our time, yes, fifteen seconds) vacation he always gave himself before pushing back out into the plazas.

"Daddy," began Katey, from her ordinary couch-potato position—from which she was starting to migrate periodically and alarmingly, "I really appreciate all you've done, in getting my medicine and the toys."

"Oh honey, it's nothing," said Chuck. "It's the least I can do, considering things." He was thinking about his soul companion, her mother, the one they had lost back in Vegas (the real Strip, not the unnecessary superfluous faux one that was Fortune City).

"And I managed to beat Mega Man, just a couple of hours ago," she offered idly, sort of hinting.

Chuck nodded, staring emptily into the twirling atoms of dust in the security camera room air.

"As…as much as I appreciate all you've done…I wouldn't mind, perhaps, Daddy…if you could please please…do a bit more again."

Chuck looked sideways, out of the corner of his eye at his daughter.

"What…what do you mean, honey?"

"Well, like I said, I've beaten one of the recent Mega Man games—_one_ of them," she started, emphatically stressing the "one" so that the word pretty much launched into her father's face. "I kind of…sort of wouldn't mind if you perhaps managed to get a few more for me."

"Now where would I..." Chuck started, as he could swear that he never saw any videogame places out in the various sections of the City.

"I've saw on security feeds that some of the Tape It Or Dies have a stash in their hideout…maybe, Daddy, you can go and scare up some from them…even if you might have to pay a little. I just need all of what's on this little list here."

There were about thirteen games on the list, all for what appeared to be a Playstation Portable, but wasn't. (It was actually a portable emulator which Katey had forced Chuck to get from looters in Vegas, just before the two of them got out of dodge; among others, it played prototypes of games that weren't even out yet to the mass public and might not be out for several years, if ever). "The ones I want the most are the Mega Man Battle Network games."

Then she looked up, at a corner of the room, as if gazing directly into some imagined camera mounted there, and said, "Be sure to check out the new Mega Man Battle Network 70, designed by Keiji Inafune, in stores now!" (This one _was_ available to the purchasing public.)

This made Chuck blanch somewhat, Stacey turn from her watchperson position at the security controls, and even Snowflake perk his head up and growl at bit.

Chuck figured it was just a bit of cabin fever with his daughter, though. He sighed, then seconds later gave in. "Alright, alright, anything for my little Kateykins. Anything else you need?"

Katey looked up at the ceiling a second. Then: "Well, it might be sweet of you if you maybe got me a pretty knit cap and one piece pajama. You can get it at Small Fry Duds, I saw them from the security feeds. I kind of need it, …for _him_." She muttered this last phrase under her breath.

"What? Who?"

"Oh, nothing Daddy." She reached over and ruffled the mane of the once psychotic but now inexplicably gentle Snowflake. (Yes, I know about the steaks, but still, beings get hungry again, you know? And that was like three days ago). "I can't wait till you get back again."

"Me neither, my precious Freedom Cub." Chuck stepped out again into the security hallway, to once more take on the zombified zones of Fortune City.

The motocross champ was crossing Donatucci's, grabbing lobsters off counters (as he might have done similarly in an alternate reality with a better ending, snatching lobsters off of the cement underfoot to put directly into his mouth for energy while fighting a wayward final enemy firing at him from above), while he thought of what happened thereafter in the security area.

"Honey, I managed to get you most of what you asked for…Ultimate Apocalyptic Ghouls n' Ghosts n' Goblins, Super Duper Street Fighter 5 Hyper ADHD Returning Defending Champion Edition, and two of the three Mega Man Battle Network titles you wanted me to get."

"I see, Daddy," said Katey, her face lighting up a bit especially at the last part. Not focusing at all on the four that Chuck did succeed in getting, she said, "Which…which one didn't you manage to find?"

Chuck crinkled his brow. "It was Mega Man Battle Network 69, honey. Johnny Pipes just didn't have one on him."

"But that's the best one!"

"Look, honey, I went all over the place, I checked Children's Castle, I checked the Robsakas. Okay? They just didn't have it. …Oh, by the way, I also got the cap and PJs for you from Small Fry." He threw the clothing to his daughter lightly (when before he might have handed them to her…he was getting a little impatient with her).

"But you know that I just have to have all of them. I can't believe that you couldn't find…"

"Katey, I told you, I went all over!" returned Chuck firmly, his voice a little raised. Paces away, Rebecca Chang was just coming back from interviewing some of the Looters, spinning their trade as a story on "capitalism thriving in the face of undead catastrophe." "I'm telling you, I just couldn't find it! I couldn't get a 69 out there! I just couldn't get a 69!"

"Chuck 'Still Creek Savior' Greene!" purred Rebecca, as she alighted into the room. "That is _not_ something you discuss with your young daughter."

He ran a worn hand across his face to straighten out all the excitement.

"Now with _me_, of course," she said a bit more softly, sauntering toward him in her inappropriately unsettling vampy come-on tones as she approached, "you can discuss matters such as this. In fact, I would be delighted to table this discussion for the not too distant future."

"That's not what I meant, Becca," said Chuck, also softly, so that his daughter didn't hear. He didn't want her to grow up too fast—though between her exposure to the undead hordes as well as her ever-increasing spirit of materialism, she was growing up pretty damn fast nonetheless. Still, he wanted to preserve some part of her innocence, while he could.

"Well, it's something we can…_get into_…later, at any rate." By this point Rebecca was lustily circling Chuck so many times she was basically doing laps around him. "You'll see why I work for…_Action_ News…"

"Alright, alright. Later," he told her, Rebecca backing off at last. She smirked at him suggestively, then slinked off into another of the safehouse's many rooms.

Chuck of course didn't really mean anything sexual when he mentioned the Mega Man sequel's oversaturatingly high numeric designation…though he had to admit to himself that when he said to Katey "I was gonna get some right after the show," just as the two reached the security camera area for the first time, he definitely wasn't talking about Zombrex.

And he'd also had saved…

"Daddy, I was gonna ask you about this, too!" Katey piped up, pulling an envelope from the table upon which there was milk and OJ days before. She pointed: "This here…SUMMER FUN(D)." Are we gonna go somewhere again next summer? Are you gonna take me on that trip to Capcom Headquarters like I asked before? Are we gonna meet Keiji, like I always wanted?"

At this point Chuck wanted to sit down, right next to Snowflake, bury his head in his hands, and wonder if he should want to have his head chomped off by the titanic, if tranquilized, tiger. "…Yes," he lied, finally. "Yes, it was supposed to be a surprise, but yeah, I'm taking you there next June. Although I told you before, Keiji Inafune doesn't reside on our version of Earth."

"Oh boy! I can't wait anyway, Daddy!" Katey said, a bit more mollified after the trauma of not completing her Battle Network collection, uninterrupted up to 71.

Chuck smiled sheepishly at her, shaking his head at one of Cora Russel's "employees" who was walking past outside—the one for whom the envelope was originally intended, for use hopefully sometime in the next hour or so.

Ah, well; there was still Rebecca.

"Maybe I'll be able to get Battle Network 69 _then_, Daddy," she added, pointedly, at Chuck.

As the hero was leaving once again, to risk his rear for the sake of friggin' _peace art_, he could hear his daughter once again crowing up into an imaginary camera in a corner of the security room, "Be sure to pick up Dark Void -17—yet another "minus" prequel delving in the muddled past of Will Grey—Executively Produced by Keiji Inafune and in stores NOW!"

Now Chuck was sprinting through passels of the creatures, busting open an occasional teller machine or two to bring the aforementioned "fun" funds back up. Hopefully he would be better able to hide these assets from his daughter next time.

He thought about what she had asked him to do next.

"I'm a bit tired of Mega Man and Arthur and Ryu and Wayne from Lost Planet Colonies Edition and Viewtiful Joe and Dante for right now, Daddy," she had said. "I was wondering if you could possibly get me something to draw or paint with. I have some really fun pictures in my head I wanna draw."

Chuck opened and closed his mouth at this, refreshed somewhat that his daughter was at least asking for something that was not completely consumer-based, something creative and constructive instead. "Well, okay…what is it that you'd like?"

"I want some of the spray paints that are out there—maybe like the green ones, like our last name, Daddy, we could live up to it and make everything green!—and some of those construction cones to mark off my work."

Chuck had kind of had it with making everything green or "going green" lately, having endured Vikki's fetch favor and her own terrible pun on his surname. Still, he'd had a twenty-second wind, so he obliged her.

In the ensuing hour and a half or so (his time), Chuck had recovered the artistic items Katey had requested, bestowed them unto his now-somewhat-beloved child, and had snatched up Lillian and her mother Camille to boot. He brought the older woman and her daughter back, then skipped up the stairs, ready once again to check on his daughter (as well as involuntarily check upon Snowflake).

She wasn't there.

"What the hell?" he started, looking over at Ray, who was just leisurely hoofing into the room. "Where's Katey?"

"I tried to stop her," the seeming security guard said, near the doorway, "she was too fast for husky old me."

Chuck looked incredulously at Ray…

…then looked in wide-eyed disbelief at the giant red door out and to the left.

Between two of the three orange pylons Chuck had nabbed for his daughter were huge letters scrawled out in green: "KT + KG 4FR."

It was a good thing for Katey, too, that she managed to hide soundlessly inside the maintenance room just near to the airduct, while Chuck cantered past with his latest two survivors…good thing he didn't need to make a tape-it pit stop then and there.

Because now it could be seen, in the small enclosure, a small pair of hands barely clearing the tabletop, with a can of spray paint in one hand and the third pylon in the other, while painfully generic metal music played in the background.

Minutes later, after wasted instants of fruitless searching: "Do you have any idea where she might have gotten to?" Chuck demanded, ready to pin Ray against the wall. "Any idea where she might be?"

"Take it…take it easy, man. That cute little CURE number's out there now, trying to get her to come back in. You must have just missed her."

"LET OUR CASINO MANAGEMENT KNOW THAT I WILL NOT STAND FOR THE SYSTEMATIC NEGLECT OF MY RELATIONSHIP WITH KEIJI INAFUNE!"

It sounded like it was coming from the television inside the security camera room.

Chuck hurried back into the security camera room a moment, ignoring Snowflake's of course understandably booming restlessness, and stared.

He couldn't believe it.

Out there—right out in Royal Plaza, atop the awning of the second floor Players, was Rebecca with her ever-present camcorder, filming her, his daughter, dressed in the duds Chuck secured for her from Small Fry (in an attempt to impress an Executive Producer from another reality), standing around with a taped-it makeshift airhorn. Somehow she managed to configure the device such a way that she could speak into it, rather than just make the horn's head-exploding sound.

"WE MUST TAKE DRASTIC ACTION NOW!" she finished, lowering the device and looking around at several zombies who couldn't give a good damn about her cause. (As if ordinary humans would care, either). Regardless, Katey somehow managed to get her hands on the red/white/blue spray paint as well, and had graffitied KURE (which stood for Katey and keiji United across Related Earths, as she explained to Rebecca moments before) all across the windows and walls nearby.

Fortunately for her, and for Chuck's sanity, out rushing towards both Katey and Rebecca was Stacey Forsythe, finally taking action once again after enduring her three-day-long bout of the sedentary armchair-commanding disorder known as Otisitis. (Her case was not as severe or intrusive as that which occurred in Willamette, however, which was a plus for Chuck (and a minus for Frank, back then)). Stacey quickly whisked up Chuck's daughter, shot Rebecca a condemningly sour look, and, accordingly, the three began to beat it back to the safehouse once more. Stacey, for one, couldn't believe that things had regressed to this point with Katey. (Though she had to concede that the girl would make a good activist someday…she just needed an adjustment regarding her desired missions and visions).

So now Chuck was finally making it through past the last few stores of Royal Flush, running just past The Man's Sport, sort of sideways drop kicking through windows to nab some boxing gloves on the way. He'd already had a bowie knife in his possession, and (not to be blasphemous or anything but) everyone was lately comparing him to Jesus almost, citing the trite phrase "What would Chuck do?" which everyone adopted as a credo except of course for Seymour, whose messiah was apparently John Wayne instead. Chuck was also blasphemously Christlike in terms of the miracles he could seemingly perform; among them was indeed the miracle of the gloves and knives, in which he could amazingly multiply one meager bowie knife into ten to use for his knife gloves. (Who knows, though, perhaps Christ himself might have performed that miracle as well, had He been around a bit longer). And also like Jesus, Chuck showed off his great miracle(s) to women of ill repute with whom he fraternized—though unlike in the Good Book, Summer was no Mary Magdalene, and Chuck had less honest intentions with his own professional lady than did Jesus.

He was anxious like nothing before, because he knew he was almost going to miss his deadline. It was well past 8:00am, and reassuringly, Katey was all 'brexed up for the day—yes, she'd already had her "'brexfast"—so that was not the concern right now.

What Chuck was now hurrying about was of much more paramount concern.

It was 9:44. He was running through the first set of double doors, then down past the maintenance ones (ducking his head in despite his rush…just to make sure about any more possible wayward activity on Katey's part), then at last into the steamy subterranean areas just before the airvent, which this time Chuck took on with a jumping baseball slide of sorts.

Flopping out of the duct a few seconds later—9:46 now—Chuck huffed back into the security camera chamber.

Again, no sign of Katey.

He was about to throw up his hands (as well as whatever was in his stomach, once again about to live up to his name by literally up-CHUCKing as he did after he had a spoiled hamburger or too much vodka), when all of a sudden:

"FULL HOUSE, FOOLS!"

He couldn't believe it. Because he was so busy recently settling the Family Feud, castigating the perpetrators of the World's Most Dangerous Trick, and paying his dues (not moneywise, but the hard way) to become a member of the Fortune City Botany Club, he'd never made time to Ante Up.

Katey, though, apparently just did.

Chuck ran through the labyrinthine, confusing-ass corridors of the safehouse, going up and down staircases and getting lost a bit to eventually get to the source of the sound.

He then bent to one knee and punched the ground in utter, my-daughter-has-turned-esque frustration.

"Katey, what in Gordon Dawkins's good name…?"

In the room before him, there were survivors out of sorts, clotheswise. Yes, Kristin was wearing her blue robe deviation from the flouncy entertainer gear from before…but the _others_. Jack was now in full-out armor, his green and yellow shirt and other telltale clothing (other than his helmet, which now matched the rest of him perfectly) cooped up in a far corner. Woodrow was similarly outrageously decked out, in an orange jumpsuit (which Jack and the others here figured he should get used to anyway, with his federal offenses), Woody's suit stashed near to Jack's plus-size wear. Trixie-Lynn, still with her inbred-Cobra-Commander-esque red bandana, yes…but her own duds additionally in the same nook, and herself with a Willamette Security uniform on. The heavenly hayseed returned Chuck's incredulous look with a glance that seemed to say, "What? It's cold up in here, yo."

It was then that Chuck realized that his alternate hero costumes were likely not in his locker anymore.

And yes, what else was situated atop all of that apparel in the corner but…

…Puff Puff.

His daughter was reverting back to her "giant red die" days…only this time, the stakes were much higher, and individuals other than towering stuffed animals were being affected.

And Katey herself, well she looked almost the same as before…but her headphones were now replaced with nothing other than a bright white Terror Is Reality baseball cap. At this point he didn't even want to know where or how she got that.

"Hey Chu-… I mean, Daddy."

He ignored this filial insubordination. "Honey, what are you…"

"You're late, you know. Two minutes." She held up two forefingers to punctuate this. It was 9:49.

"I can't…GIVE THESE PEOPLE BACK THEIR CLOTHES!"

"What was the deal? I was supposed to be given Zombrex between the hours of 7:00am and 8:00am…then I was supposed to be given a new Capcom video game between the hours of 1:00pm and 2:00pm, 5:30pm and 6:30pm, 9:13 and 10:13pm, 3:56am and 4:56am, and…what other time?" She finished this last phrase condescendingly.

"8:47am and 9:47am." He was more tired than anything at this point.

"Right, right. And, as with the shots, not a minute before or after each window."

He just looked at her. At her, with yet again stacks of money behind her…and the others with not even the threads originally on their backs to their names.

"Stacey must have called about your running short, so there's no excuse. It doesn't matter anyway, I guess, because I'm bored with this. Hell, I can even give these people back what they wore…and you can get your old costumes back, Dad. Just let them use your bathroom/saveroom for a few minutes."

Chuck's head was about to explode like that of an undead upon whom he had delivered a DDT. As the other poker players were filing out to go to his bathroom: "What do I have to do, to get you to stop, Katey?"

The precocious, too-cute-under-any-circumstances,-even-these tyke merely shrugged, then looked at the ground for a bit.

She then turned her head back up to look him directly in the eye:

"Give me thirty million."

"WHAT?"

"Think about it, Chuck. You paid some tacky leather-wearing gambling-problem hillbilly twenty-five thou to accompany you back here. You put up half a mil with the useless Looting bastards for the sake of a spin or three in that ugly orange convertible. And don't think I didn't figure out what that envelope back there was for…ten thousand just to bring those floozy "professionals" to the safehouse…and then what you wanted to pay for with that…Chavez imbecile on top of it? Surely _I'm_ worth much more than _that_.

"And besides," she continued, "I'll put the money toward a worthy cause; I'm gonna find a way to cross over to Inafune's world, in time. Keijunior, his son, is pretty high maintenance…and for once I think I'm gonna take care of someone else, rather than be taken care of."

Chuck looked off petulantly into a corner of the room. After all of what he did and provided.

"Man, f**k this."

He started off back towards the security camera room, on his own.

"I KNEW YOU WERE THE BAD GUY!" screamed Katey from the now-distant makeshift hustler den.

"Go advanced-zombie-vomit in your TIR hat, honey," the man said from over his shoulder.

Chuck went back to the camera room and just lay down for a while, taking an extended vacation of about six minutes. By that point, the zombies from the worst ending possible came lurching to the threshold; Stacey tried to stop them, but before they could bust in, Chuck leaped forward and spread the door wide, welcomingly open.

"I literally couldn't afford to save her," he said to Stacey, who cupped her hands aghast with eyes wide as he spun out back first onto the floor, cradling his fingers relaxedly behind his head as he waited for the incoming undead to work him over.


	2. Stupid Carl Kart

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "STUPID CARL KART"

_Another day, another delivery,_ thought Fortune's most resourceful mailman as he made his usual Royal Flush rounds. Carl Schiff sometimes felt winded, winding around his standard route as he did, but the satisfaction of a job well done in delivering parcels to people all over town sustained him.

"Paper!" he shouted, flinging the daily tabloid at the nearby Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow kiosk, expecting that the owner as always would reach out to catch it as readily as always. The routine of Carl's route was such that he didn't even bother to turn his head to look anymore to check whether the owner had caught it this time.

Which was just as well, because unbeknownst to Carl's cracked mind, the kiosk was now occupied by nothing but the living, shambling, ever-decaying dead.

"PAPER!" he screamed again as he chucked a second periodical at another store, his dementia-diluted mind oblivious to the outlet's display window he just shattered with the read. It was really insanity laced with annoyance; why didn't the paperboy show up today? Carl'd had to pull double duty to pick up the slack. It wasn't even in his contract to deliver the _Fortune City Scoop_, but he did it out of the love of delivery. (Meanwhile, the regular paper delivery agent, young Tim Duggan, lay flat on his back in the One Little Duck, a buffet for various bustling ghouls in the outdoor areas of the casino haven.

Yes, the love of delivery, in any case, kept Carl going.

And it was a delivery out of love that propelled him through the safehouse airvent, not with frayed nerves and shotgun but with fancy packages and a s**t-eating grin.

"Got the goods for everyone today!" Carl hollered, his hands flailing for everyone to come down to the vent. Many girls especially flocked to him, as some were making mail order purchases online to satisfy their shopping joneses in the wake of the locality's catastrophe. Luz Palmer was first, gleefully grabbing a long rectangular prism of a parcel—inevitably another nine to add to her quiver of clubs to use once she got out of this ordeal. Brittany Beck was overjoyed to receive her custom-ordered croupier stick, with which she could hopefully now have a chance to fend off the frenzied Stuart Holmes, with whom she was hemmed in and who wielded his own casino stave ever so fiercely. Vikki Taylor was happy to receive a package of plants, and Tammy Blaine satisfied with her package of pants. (Finally: no more going commando).

And no one was more pleased than Europa Westinghouse.

"I've got them, I've got them, at last!" exclaimed the enterprising young blonde, still clad in almost nothing, waving a small soft beige package in the air. "I've never had a chance to get these before! I've heard they're so good, though!"

Bessie Kent looked complacent from across the vent area, living vicariously through another woman's thrill of consumer-based conquest.

"I've finally received my clawthace!" continued Europa. "My precious clawthace!" At least it sounded like "clawthace."

Rosa Collins too looked happy for the young, very much clueless golden-haired Greek-nymph namesake. Then she leaned into Bessie's ear. "The f**k's 'clawthace'?"

Bessie just shrugged back, still smiling and nodding in Europa's direction.

Their mutual friend Erica Mayes decided not to stand there just wondering. She walked up to Europa and pulled her arm down to have a looksee at what this "clawthace" could possibly be. A moment later, she flashed a smug grin at her friends, then patted the nearly naked girl's shoulder.

"This says CLOTHES, honey," the terribly tanned survivor offered to the evidently addled Europa, then sauntering back to her friends. Everyone shared a stifled snicker.

Well, who could blame the blonde for failing to say it correctly, barely ever having encountered the product or embraced the concept?

Carl's own oblivious mind was unfortunately unattuned to such hilarity, as he fixated upon the one woman who mattered most to him: the elderly yet elegant Esther Alwin. No young floozy could float this mailman's boat, no…it took a long cool woman in a captivating black dress (at least in Carl's perception), like Esther, to grab his attention. And he had the pleasure toys she had so fervently requested.

"My grandson's favorite!" began Esther, appreciatively, as she stretched her wizened arms for the delivery which was the most special, to Carl. "Oh, Carl, he'll be _so_ pleased to finally receive this for next Christmas."

"It was nothing, my Erogenous Esty," began the mailman, trying to sound gentlemanly (but inevitably coming off rather lasciviously, with an epithet like that).

"Wh-what was that?" returned Esther a mite awkwardly.

"Oh…nothing," Carl quickly corrected himself. Even he could tell that calling the prim and proper lady what he did was somewhat off kilter.

They shared another few pleasantries, Carl eventually regaining some modicum of confidence and composure, while he absently cast off another package to a particular male…

…which, not long after reaching the intended target, was espied and snapped up by another, much more insidious man…who hungrily hugged the parcel to his pectorals…eager to host another up-for-grabs in the near future.

Oh, how was Carl to know that that last package he delivered was the key to Esther's hoary heart! He stewed in his mail cart, raring at the steering wheel and ready to rip up the strip.

The parcel in question, which was not long ago clutched to the chest of none other than the tyrannical Tyrone King, was packed with Phenotrans's newest offering: Phenomones. Just as decades ago, the fake fad infiltrated the comic book advertisements and young minds of stifled, frustrated young men, so too was it here, now, in 2010. Pheromones! The natural phenomenon that no woman with a working libido could resist! Have all the ladies flock to your waist with the influential odor or whatever the hell it was with pheromones!

But the pharm giant proved to be no Phonytrans in this endeavor. No…having gathered key critical extracts from rare, dangerous insects known as "knaves," this new item was the real deal. Phenomones proved to be the thing that could attract anyone one wanted—basically one would become a warm body magnet, able to nab any living creature who was one's heart's desire.

And Tyrone, being on Pheno's payroll, was fully aware of this new advance.

Of course, he didn't need it for himself. He had all the satisfaction one could possibly want in this endeavor, his sleazy conquests making Wilt Chamberlain look like the four-thousand-year-old virgin.

But Ty knew that others were in desperate want of the product. And now, amongst so many comers, three gentlemen arrived to start their engines, here on the Silver Strip.

After drawing a small lottery through the bingo globe at the Little Duck (where Carl finally learned why little Timmy couldn't make his paper route the last couple of days), a trio of contestants emerged for the sake of the parcel chase.

Sergeant Dwight Boykin, ready now at the wheel of his humvee, self-assured that he would easily take down the other two bozos racing against him.

Randy Tugman, embracing tightly the handlebars of a tiny pink tricycle (which so effectively complemented his pink chainsaw)…his competitors were gawking and guffawing but they didn't know the secret bit of boost he would have in the diminutive tripod on wheels.

And none other than his truly, Carl Schiff, at the helm of his trusty mail cart.

Each was racing for their own objects of affection…Carl, of course for Esther; Randy, for a various assortment of possible new brides, who would surely not be added to his discard pile but rather would form part of his newly hatched plan for sexagamy (a plan to marry six women at once…his name for it was, yes, of course innuendo intended); and Dwight? Well, let's just say that he wanted his few good men in the platoon to come back to him…most intimately.

Carl gripped the wheel of his cart tightly as he waited for the chocolate- and vanilla-haired whores on either side of TK to drop their arms, signaling the beginning of the competition. The mailman gritted bitterly through the anticipation; he should have never let that package go.

And "GO" was the operative word in the next moment as the Bailey Twins threw down their immaculate arms at the end of the strip, just near the Yucatan. Sure enough, the three vehicles blasted off towards their objective on the other side. Carl Schiff cantered along furiously in his mail skiff, the Sarge varoomed along in his military-issue monster…and Randy Tugman puttered along in his trike, the other two entirely unaware as to what was about to occur regarding the third "man"'s vehicle.

It should have been the case, as you might have cynically predicted a few paragraphs ago, that Dwight Boykin would easily take the race, no question. After all, he was officially the biggest dog, in his hypercompensating hunter green hummer.

But the reality of it was that, as Max Brooks somewhat speculated in his venerable survival guide to the undead, a four-wheel vehicle—even a humvee—did not fare the greatest in zombie traffic, especially if the carriage wasn't convertible and the roads were woefully blocked. Which was entirely the case with Boykin's whip, as the enclosed beast that was Boykin's ride was bumping furiously amidst hordes of creatures and debris and suffering sorely for it. And the fact that the Sarge had torn through a number of rabid, vomiting vampiric creatures hours before with the vehicle, largely at the vehicle's own expense, didn't help at all, either. (The green gas zombies had somehow died down and out since, but the unleaded undeaded were still going at things in their usual quantities).

And it was then, just as Sergeant Boykin and Carl the mailman were neck and neck, coursing past the Shamrock, that they heard the supersonic shout of Randy Tugman's juvenile joyride.

WHOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, went the raging flame at the back of Tugman's tricycle, not unlike the fireball emanating from the rear of the 1960s Batmobile as the Tug Trike (miserably dubbed by the impotent would-be-superhero Randy himself) streaked triumphantly past the pair against whom he was racing. _Damn,_ thought Carl, as he tried to bring his cart up to thirty-five: That battery, whiskey, and motor oil, from which Randy had created his own brainchild of a jet burner, were more items he'd now regretted delivering. The mailman decided then and there that a perfect work record was the doublest-edged of swords.

Fortunately for the postal plodder, Randy's engine invention worked too well, and soon the postpubescent pile of perverseness that was Tugman the Lesser (in so many ways), after looking over his should with pride at the opponents he'd left behind, had found himself within yards of imminent impact with an outcropping near to the Motion Madness, the giant blue g-force-harnessing sphere near the entrance to Royal Flush Plaza. "WHUGGGGGHHH!" he'd exclaimed, trying to stop himself in vain as his bawdy body rocked against the trike careening into the synthetic crag, the tricycle shattering into so many fragments as its portly, pathetic rider bounced back badly against the concrete near to the gyrating azure sphere.

Several meters back, while Master Randy was attempting in vain to shake out the cobwebs, the upcoming second and third places that were Dwight and Carl were catching up quickly. Just as they reached about the same position as the now-supine Tugman, however, the soldier's humvee huffed its final hurrah, its motor bursting upon striking just one more monster milling about on the strip.

And Carl, poor poor Carl…in his zeal to fulfill his postal duties hours earlier, and his haste to reach the starting line, he'd completely neglected to fill 'er up. Even for a stretch of meters, he didn't have enough gas to complete the course. (Yes, this is rather lame, but it's Carl Schiff we're talking about here).

And so the three competitors sat, or lay strewn, about the course, the objects of their affection and phenomones on their minds. "Maddy," cried Randy, thinking of Madison Lainey, the young starlet who sought to gain fame as an alluring assistant to the Roger and Reed magic show. (And yes, of course he also thought of Danni Bodine…AND Lulu Barra...AND Jessica Howe…AND the other ladies whom he'd hoped would make up his prospective sextet of spouses).

Sergeant Dwight Boykin reclined ruefully in his humvee seat, allowing himself an instant to collect himself and think of his own beloved. In a cry similar to that of Randy's, the Sergeant: "Matty…" Those man-morsels who were Matthew Kuss and Michael Woo wouldn't be able to stave off Dwight's advances, once he'd won those newly minted pharmaceutically-empowered pheromones.

Then Carl, banging his fist against the steering column in abject fury: "Esther."

_Esther._

It was, seconds ago, Carl who drove, as he pushed his beloved little cart along.

Now it was Esther, the thought of magnificent Esther, that drove him.

"!" bellowed Carl, filled thoroughly with lust and rage, as he bounded from his gas-thirsty mail cart and towards the Motion Madness. The Sarge caught sight of this from his now useless humvee, and took his own measures, thrusting out of his military people-mover in an effort to stop what only madmen such as he, Carl, and Randy could grasp as the mailman's mad plan.

So in turn, yes, Randy, too summoned up enough strength to try and trip up the Schiff with his giant pink chainsaw as he scrambled for the sphere. But the sprightly mail carrier was too quick, and leaped away, dodging the corpulent cad's frightening saw as it swung shinwardly.

"Come…come on," crabbed Carl as he struggled to pry open the small doorlet into the rolling ball. It wasn't locked or anything…the postal worker was just fumbling in his panic to get into the giant blue ball before the lewd leviathan that was Randy Tugman could bear down on him.

Then, with the unrealistically superhuman flair of a cinematic action hero, the mailman stopped, propped his trusty shotgun over one shoulder, and shoved the butt of it backward, striking Randy across his nasty- ass kisser just as the chubby childling chillingly reached for him from behind. Carl then struck out with the back of his shotgun again, banging open the door to the gigantic blue sphere, climbing in, and slamming the door shut behind him.

As Randy meanwhile staggered backward, struggling to shake out the cobwebs, then fell over forward to barf a bit in the midst of all this bodily abuse, Sergeant Dwight reached into his vest greedily for a grenade. Tearing off the pin with his teeth, the Sarge chucked the explosive pineapple, hoping for the small projectile to land just within the brassy bounds of Carl's new hopeful makeshift vehicle. However, due to the soldier's latent insanity, his aim was off a bit, and though the lobbed grenade flew somewhat gracefully through the air, it nonetheless fell short of its target…

But scored a hole in one…or one in the hole, rather…right into the rear entryway of Randy Tugman as he was leaning forward to retch and ralph.

The pudgy psychopath stood up to scratch his head a moment as he wondered what the blockage in his behemoth back entrance was all about. Then…

"…"

All five hundred-some kilograms of Randy Would-Be-Batman-But-Instead-Was-Truly-Awful-Tugman Tugman launched horrifically yet somewhat terrifically into the airspace above the racers, the now-flying fatty reaching an altitude of about the highest rooftop of the Fortune Casinos before beginning a descent onto the Platinum Screens, the improvised lair of Deetz Hartman…the skeeziest redneck of the redneck snipers…who at this point was the last one left and looking to score some extra practice on these waywardly racing fools.

"Yeah, I'm 'a git 'im!" crowed Deetz, eagerly looking through his sniperscope but instants before. "Mur'ca don't need idjits like this in her borders!"

But just as old Deetzy was about to let loose with his prized rifle… the tub of unmentionable mass that was Randy Tugman…

"!"

…had splashed down most unceremoniously upon the hick's hapless form, seemingly crushing to death the Appalachian antagonist, the bloated boy blunder's buttocks emitting fireballs as his tricked out trike did just minutes before. It could be assuredly assumed that Master Tugman was removed from the competition at this point.

Meanwhile: "You're not going anywhere, bucko," snarled Sergeant Boykin down groundside, his LMG now pointing out before him, aimed readily at Carl within the Motion Madness. But before the government-issue soldier could fire his volley of fury, the government-issue postal worker spoke out with his own gun, his shotgun blasting the supports of the blue sphere, sending the ball off its moorings. "," uttered Carl helplessly as he rolled along, unintentionally caroming straight for the sergeant on the other side of the strip. Sure enough, the soldier let loose with a stream of gunfire…but the revolving ball deflected all of the bullets, leaving its occupant unharmed. It was all Dwight could do to dive out of the way at the last second before Carl's ball rolled right over him and crashed into a fountain in the center of Fortune Park.

Fortunately for the mad mailman, though, the ball didn't get caught in the fountain, nor did it break apart or anything of that sort, but rather just bounced off, bumping the carrier back out into the middle of the strip and down straight towards the pursued-after Platinum Strip end. Everything was hopefully, finally going to fall into place for Carl after all.

Gathering to his anally booted feet, Dwight could only watch as his only other competition at this point barreled down the steppes of the strip, the ball gaining more and more momentum as it murdered zombie bystanders indiscriminately. By the time the soldier imitated this in miniature by rushing to the bingo/lottery ball, ripping it off its supports, and birling along on it like a clown on a ball or a lumberjack in a…birling contest (look it up ), Carl had hurtled across the finish line, his giant ball conveyance crushing into the doors of the Terror Is Reality Arena Entrance.

In the ensuing minutes, Tyrone and the Twins had caught up to the victor in a Fortune City Industry Cart, the emcee swinging his majestic microphone along the way, striking the birling Dwight Boykin off his bingo ball, and knocking out the shellshocked soldier (hey, the Sarge was still very dangerous, with more grenades and his phallic ass firearm). By the time the TIR hosts reached Carl, he was still coming to from the last crash, wearily tottering out of the (giant rolling ball).

"Well, we're here now with the biiiiiiiiiiiiig winnnnnnnnnnnnerrrrrrrrrrrrr," crooned Tyrone as he grabbed Carl's wobbly arm to hold it up in victory. "The Phenomones are yours to have and enjoy as you please…"

Carl managed a weak, exhausted smile, thinking only of artificially seducing Esther in his dazed reverie.

"…at least what's left of them, in any case!"

This last was met with a spastic glare by the maddened mail carrier. What did TK mean by that? He searched the blank smiles of the Twins, as well as the shaded gaze of the TIR master of ceremonies, and found nothing.

It was back at the safehouse that Carl found out what it meant.

"Whaddya MEAN you're going off with him!" screamed the scrawny parcel deliveryman, once he saw his beloved Esther…on the arm of the biggest charlatan Bohemian artiste he'd ever seen.

"Oh, you're sweet, Carl," started Esther, waving him off as she hugged the bereted beefcake of sorts alongside her, "And you did so well in that little…competition and what not. But I like a man who takes his time…a man with vision…a man with dreams, and artsiness…"

And it was then that Carl caught sight of a small vial just beyond the artiste that was Randolph Allen, a container of the famed Phenotrans Phenomones, from the package which was originally addressed to Randolph TUGMAN but somehow instead accidentally found its way into the hands of the artsy fartsy Randolph instead…as it worked out, it appeared that Carl's work record hadn't been so perfect after all. Delivering to the wrong Randolph and what not, a man of his mail carrying caliber! He should've been ashamed.

"We're going to be wed soon enough, and by none other than the father of another Randolph," said Esther proudly "once old Emanuel can get his son off that rooftop, that is."

Carl could only stand and gape with his jaw slack at this.

"I'm going to be a new woman…Esther Alwin-Allen…isn't that right, my dear Randy?" the kindly old lady piped.

"That's right, my little masterstroke," returned the artistic failure yet seductive success that was Randolph Allen, as he leaned in for a peck on Esther's cheek.

Standing there steaming in the safehouse and taking all this in, after all he went through, it was enough for someone like Carl to, well…

…culminate his career the same way all disgruntled postal workers did.

(Note: Thanks to ttobba for comments on my other stories; I don't know my way around entirely, but I think you have to submit a review that's not anonymous in order for me to respond to you. So leave your screen name in the review, so I can respond! Thanks for the comments so far, in any case. And others who read, please review/comment; anything would be great, whether positive, negative, constructive, destructive, neutral, whatever…the worst thing for someone who writes (fanfiction or otherwise) is to just write in a vacuum and never get feedback or anything. Hoping all are doing well who are reading this.)


	3. Compensation Chasing

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "COMPENSATION CHASING AND ITS CALAMITOUS CONSEQUENCES"

Upon seeing Stuart rip his way through the umpteenth troop of recently deceased, Brittany decided she had enough. Watching him gallivanting around in the clockless Americana at about quarter after four (by her estimation), after enduring all of this for about an hour and a half total, had grated on the young woman's nerves something fierce. It would only be so many more minutes before she would let her guard down just enough for a wayward undead to overtake her—and judging by the maniacal manner by which Stuart was swinging that nightstick at his afterliving adversaries, his flailing behavior suggestive of a mind seemingly gone in a haze of greed breeding with survival instinct desperation, it didn't look as if he were going to do anything to improve his situation—or hers either, for that matter.

But he always was there for her to lean on before, so she had thought for so long at least up until about half past two this afternoon, so hopefully he might come around soon. When Stuart and Brittany first detected signs that Fortune's establishment was railroading them, exploiting them for their increasingly expendable services (machines were replacing personnel there at an alarming rate for everything from card game dealing to other entertainments, as could be observed in everything in Americana from the new video poker setup to the self-operating bucking bronco), young Miss Beck knew that she could at least lean on Stuart for support. Misery loved company anyway, and the two young gambling enterprise grunts had each other's back on all occasions.

Over the past few days, though, misery gave way to frayed nerves and then just out and out frenzy, as first Brittany then Stuart found a bit of pink mixed in with their red, white, and blue color coded paychecks. The young woman gave herself over to weeping more often than not, being one of those people who only passively internalized the pain of matters such as breakups, family crises, or loss of employment, the last of which most severely affected her now. But Stuart; he took things hard too, but handled it a bit more… proactively.

Zombie infestation be damned, Stuart Holmes was going to get his due. And he would do it with the very croupier stick that started him out at this lousy dive. In the ensuing days since that brazen motocross champ planted that plastic explosive on the one barrier holding off hordes of ghouls, the blast which so undoubtedly touched off the local unliving's inheritance of Fortune, the young money monkey Holmes dealt some disorder of his own, breaking into every slot device in order to recover the days and weeks he'd felt he was entitled to in the face of his and Brittany's layoffs. And there he was at it again, Brittany could see from her place at the bar in the bread basket center of Americana, Stuart bitching and bashing all the way to the bank.

He'd easily convinced the girl to go along with him, because, he figured aloud to her, what else did she have better to do? (Other than save her own sensible skin in the face of an all-devouring undead tidal wave). And where else, he reasoned with unnatural fervor, would she be able to find so much cash in so little time? Sure, they could both be bitten—eaten, he told her, he couldn't lie to her—but a person had to go sometime. And after this, they wouldn't ever have to work again. Wouldn't have to be laid off again. Wouldn't have to suffer backbiting from any living person anymore. (He'd never said anything to her about the possibility of the nonliving biting at them in the course of this endeavor, though). In any case, Brittany went along. And she remained her passive, diffident self as he whacked around with the now apparent manifestation of his manhood that was the long, wooden croupier stick. His use of it, Brittany chuffed to herself, seemed like an instance of worker's overcompensation.

But that's how it would continue to be throughout the next several moments, as he first swung with his croupier stick, and offered her nothing more than an unwieldy roulette wheel with which to defend herself; then he'd shoved the beloved stick where the sun didn't shine (…one of his inventory slots, of course; why, what were _you_ thinking of?) and switched to an even longer than thus more "compensatory" broadsword, by the wall, while Brittany was just left with a…frigging novelty poker chip, for God's sake.

And then the breaking into the "authorized only" area, where Kristin Harris was just recovering from a voddy bender—but the sight of the far gone Holmes had driven her back to the drink, as the pretty-much-insane-by-now man reached for a handgun or two and a nightstick. Not that he passed any of this over to his Americana BFF Beck or anything.

It was then that Brittany had realized that perhaps Stuart wasn't the one upon whom she leaned. Perhaps it was the other way around.

After all, she figured upon asking herself again _Why the hell did I agree to this?,_ it really wasn't B-Beck's decision to agree with her supposed friend or not. On one hand, it wasn't as if Stuart had ever brandished his long wooden stick at _her,_ as if she were to be the next slot machine in line to receive an unceremonious caning like those who committed the slightest of misdemeanors in Singapore. On the other hand, though, watching him now, thrashing about the various slot areas without a care as to his own safety, or hers, it had hit her, harder than any intuited impromptu duct-taped weapon of undead masses destruction.

It was just Stuart himself, his boisterousness, his boorishness, which she mistook for protectiveness. All said and done, he was nothing more than a bully who was looking out for his own interests—which began and ended with his own.

And who knew—perhaps he wasn't looking out for her at all. Maybe he even wanted her for a decoy, a human shield even, against the undead—and was for this reason that he leaned upon _her_ to join him at Fortune now.

Brittany wondered all this as she fixed herself a drink—her last, she'd figured, after so many clusters of cocktails she'd made for the moolah-mooching meanderers at Americana. As unwilling as she would be to admit this to Stuart right now, were he actually ever there for her, she was a bit clumsy with the tumbler this time. Although she could mix it up with the best of them (heretofore in an alcoholic sense, and not in a combative way—at least, not yet (said this author, foreshadowingly)), on an ordinary day, this was no everyday crowd before her. One could say that these flesh-eating humanoid mockeries were a bit more pushy than even the average living, breathing casino customers.

So she took her whiskey, and her vodka, and her beer…and the ketchup she'd swiped from the BBQ, as well as the mustard, the cooking oil—and what the hell, a bit of a sample from the large red container at her feet to boot. Internalizing the life-threatening crisis as always, Brittany was now looking to go the way of Ross Folk from Willamette in a similar situation, or Andy Talbat from the here and now. But the means to her own end would come from a potable rather than a pistol, a shooter rather than a shotgun.

What Brittany didn't know was that, in Fortune's fever to supplant humanity through its mechanized makeover, the perverse powers that be substituted some much more potent appliances to augment its service stations. These changes in service tech were all backed, of course, by Phenotrans, whose installation in the resort was unquestionably effected for the sake of looking out for Fortune City's own interests—just as Stuart at the moment was certainly looking out for Brittany's, as he most assuredly always had all these years.

As such, when the young woman lifted the abominable concoction she'd prepared to her trembling lips, what she actually took in was not so much the suicide sauce she supposed it would be, but rather a galvanizing grog that generated energy within her that she never knew she had.

To be fair, had the drink consisted "merely" of whiskey and vodka and beer and ketchup and mustard, and cooking oil, Brittany Beck would have indeed had her last call, bionic blender by Phenotrans or no. It was the gasoline in the drink that she had, the juice from the red container at her feet, that literally fueled her now, as it would fuel any Industry brand go cart around the resort.

"!"

It was then, in the midst of so much baneful brute-bashing, that Stuart Holmes turned his head to see his former casino compatriot leap over the bar, her head shunting every which way, her arms thrusting out at every ghoul which tried to pin the girl down. It was far more than readily apparent that Brittany Beck wasn't going to let anyone alive, dead, or no longer either, get at her.

She reached the garish eatery on one end of Americana, the one headed up by the obnoxious indicator BENNIE JACK's BBQ SHACK. Moments later, after some loud crashes and spills sounding from behind the counter, her upper torso come back into view for all to see.

And how completely transmogrified now was the former fawning survivor.

"THIS BUTCHERY BECK'S BRITTANY SHACK BITCHES!" bellowed the incoherent yet still rather comely lass. What the hell, some rational part still left in her mind figured as she nonetheless reached for the chainsaw on the sill. She and her vision of the shack were now one; if it wanted to be Brittany, and she Butchery, she'd have no issue with it.

And neither would anyone else, she would make damn sure.

"!"

Stuart began to run up to meet his acquaintance as she began to alight from the cheap eats, noticing that her corny semi-necktie was now Rambo-edly taut across her forehead. And yes, for those of you out there who are so readily begging the question, Brittany's sternum-neighboring sovereigns were now all the more open to the casino ambience, now more than they ever had been in their young, ripe lives.

In fact, it was this that made Stuart falter a moment—and at this the faint bit of rationality left in Brittany Beck reared itself again. She knew it; she knew he'd had a thing for her all along. He always seemed to show some kind of brash interest at one time or another…but he'd never braved anything. And sure, he could be courageous, or stupid, enough to leap into a clowder of zombies to grab at some cash…but help her in this situation? Or even tell her how he'd felt about her, ever? It was all now reduced to this accidental, eternal instant of an ogle at her intimate bodily pair.

But as to his own…bodily pair, she did more than just look.

Grabbing Stuart underhandedly by jewels far cheaper than any on-the-fly precious projectile weapons available at any Capcomverse casino or shopping outlet, the berserk Beck forced her crummy companion back, back, back towards the money booth not too far away. "BUTCH GOT YER COMPENSATION FOR YOU RIGHT HERE FUCKER," she grunted at him, shoving him into the man-sized green container and slamming the door behind his staggering frame. Triumphantly she raised the roaring yellow chainsaw over her head as tens of flimsy dollar denominations fluttered up all around the man inside this richest of prisons. Stuart's thoughts, meanwhile, began migrating towards the costs he would likely incur to restore his personal family "jewel"ry and away from the money he required from the casino to make him whole.

Assuming that, at this point, Stuart would ever get out of this to deal with either affair.

And the likelihood of it seemed now to be ever dwindling. Around and around the bedeviled Beck went, decapitating and dehanditating and delegitating every former human in sight. Through a haze of green bills puffing into the airspace immediately before him, Stuart could barely make out Brittany as she leaped from nest to nest of slots, swinging madly with the saw, the jagged blade more a part of her body than of any sexually delayed freak child of a Bible thumper or any deranged firebreathing balloon-inflating Wonderland Plaza main event.

But then…

"NOT ENOUGH…BBQ NOT ENOUGH!" blared "Butchery" nonsensically from across the casino floor. "NEEDS MORE COMPS…MORE COMPS…MORE COMPS!"

Stuart accidentally banged his head against a border of the small money booth as he wondered where the hell Brittany was getting herself off to.

It was moments later—several minutes actually—after Brittany emerged from the maintenance room near the escalators to the Arena, that the now-calmed down compensation seeker discovered what his erstwhile ally was conjuring.

Even Dean Wayne ducked over in the American Historium when the girl burst out of the maintenance. Even a grizzled war vet like himself knew when to withhold from danger that was beyond him—and this lady seemed more to be reckoned with than any enemy or its ordnance.

"THIS—IS WORKER'S COMPESS-NATION STU-AARD!" shouted Brittany wildly as she bounded out from the open area near from the escalators back towards the Shots and Awe, back towards the Shack—back towards the money booth. She now held the longest of any weapon to be found at the moment in Americana. It was a device of her own making, one which even maintenance maven Chuck Greene might envy: a savage spear with almost the entirety of the amazing maize chainsaw at its business end, and a stick of firework going off readily at the handle end of the shaft. Brittany's hands were being burned wickedly by sparks, and she didn't even notice.

And it was this same wild woman who walked waveringly towards the cash booth now, this upwards-of-ten-foot-long contraption of carnage in both hands. "CHAINSPEARKLER," was all that she said, nodding at the astronomically compensating…thing in her hands, as she met his eyes with her crazed own.

And there they remained, in that stasis for a lingering moment, she searching his gaze, the small part of rationality still within her pleading to stop, the part of her which brought duct tape only to playfully shut Stuart's mouth and not to mash together the monstrosity now in hand. She looked into his eyes and saw pain, the frustration of not being paid for a good hard day's work, the fluster he had felt at having clawed through the undead all day, the more-than-discomfort at his unsettled personal area down below.

"I…I did it for you too," was all he could say to her.

Brittany wanted to believe him, as she lowered the chainspearkler down a bit. At least the small five percent minority that was her present level of sanity did.

But the other ninety-five percent didn't want to.

And what this other ninety-five percent also didn't want, it realized as the buckwild Beck lifted her weapon overhead…

…as the hapless Stuart Holmes cringed in the karma-made bed of his money booth…

…was that it didn't want its mistress to be chloroformed from behind by a brazen motocross champion-cum-deliverer-from-the-undead-damned.

But it was too late to not want that, as Stuart watched his old companion suddenly grow a purple lizard head, then collapse floppingly to the ground.

"She might not be out for long," began Chuck Greene, whipping open the door to the cash booth and yanking Stuart out of it, "That lizard mask tinged with USA spray paint essence inside was just another one of my experimental tape-its, so I don't know how effective it'll be. Come on."

"What…who are you?" was all that the disgruntled casino worker could manage at this point.

"You're Fortune personnel, right? You come with me, and I'll explain everything at the safehouse."

Chuck knew that wouldn't be enough to convince the man, but the latter thought that "safehouse" meant "a place where the safes of Fortune City Casino Resort were kept," so he more than readily went along.

And so they went, the cycle champ with the unconscious Butchery over his shoulder, Stuart's stocky self tagging along not far behind. Holmes and Beck would come to reconcile in the safe area, and in her angelic, almost penancelike treatment of her prior affront to his most personal "compensation" (she didn't have to grab him _that_ hard), he would change considerably towards the woman, and the two would begin to engage in both hard and soft but above all beautiful handling of each other's compensations to come for many years. Kristin and Dean would be left for another foray of Chuck's in the near future. And the greatest casualty, Chuck would decide, would be the disappearance of the chainspearkler, which he had observed in action from afar but could never quite duplicate on his own. Yep, as with any casino cocktail, Brittany Beck really could mix it up with, or better than, the best of them.


	4. Puff Puff the Tragic Flagon

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "PUFF-PUFF (AND) THE TRAGIC FLAGON"

_(I don't know if I'm the only one who noticed, but in the opening rally scene with Stacey in Off the Record, she actually has the same face as from the original Dead Rising 2. This story contemplates the possibility of something actually happening, between the rally and Fortune City, for her to have acquired a new face. This is just speculative, and I tend to do this in a lot of stories…I hope you enjoy and stuff)._

_(By the way, from here on out, the following stories are all serious in tone; they are not the silly/goofy kind of stuff in the first three stories above)._

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011: 5:09PM

_ What was that stoner idiot doing now?_

Stacey threw her hands to her face, allowing her fingers to flow over the features. It looked as if Brandon were effecting some new and innovative arts and crafts again with the cannabis-based equipment he brought with him to the event. And this while he was supposed to be helping to distribute literature on their cause.

An instant ago, Whittaker smashed his water pipe, made mostly of glass, against the ground in frustration. Perhaps he didn't bring enough for the fix he needed.

Just par for the course, it seemed. Stacey shook her head; she didn't know from what desert crags some of these crumbs came from.

Then the "man" took one of the shards from the object—the starkest and the sharpest—and he held it out in front of him, as if it were some sort of shiv. The CURE leader took due notice and made a mental notation to stay away from the guy for the rest of the day.

Oddly, in any case, the woman felt a bit better with such sketchy-looking folks—at least with _some of them_, some who looked sketchy on the surface. Some of them could actually turn out to be good, solid people, like a number of other CURE supporters, and completely unlike that jerk television actor who abruptly dumped her for that blonde floozy.

A mite of bitterness registered on the nonprofit prophetess's brow as she watched Gus, the aforesaid ex, now with said floozy—some other flake-ass thespian named Fay—and he now speaking out against said mission which Stacey gave all essences of her existence.

"Why would you want to save those…things, Stacey?!"

_Well, one of those "things" could be you someday,_ Gus, she mused mindfully, but she said nothing. The girl knew it was over by then, so what was the point of trying to turn him.

So many of these fools would have their bodies turned before their minds and attitudes. That was why it was up to her to lead others on this quest.

CURE would not complete its assignment till every intact body was back to normal. The group couldn't do very much for those already chopped up by chainsaws or eviscerated by excavators. But those with more than just torsos, well…they could still be saved wholly.

In any case, it was almost time for Stacey to make her pitch. She reached for her pocket mirror and propped it open, checking to make sure that everything was made up just right. The woman knew that the face of her organization had to be a beautiful one—which it was, with full lips and catlike eyes—as, one, America and especially this side of it geographically was that damn shallow to judge as such and, two, the subject of the group had countenances which were slightly less photogenic, given that said features gave way to disease and decay. Stacey's magnificent facial features thus had to take up the slack of those whom she defended.

Satisfied that she was ready, she slapped the mirror closed and grabbed for her bullhorn.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011: 5:26PM

So many minutes later, the feelings in the lady's mind were mixed. The crowd of humans Stacey addressed seemed as listless as the infected themselves; she didn't know whether to chide them for apathy or champion them for her cause.

But what also bothered her in the back of her mind was the sight of that Whittaker again. It was bad enough that he was screwing with his ganja and the gear in conjunction with it—now he was straying again, away from the table he was supposed to mind. And this was the time, of all moments, that she needed the CURErs the most.

After informing the people that drastic action had to be taken, Stacey lowered her squawker and stared out at Brandon. Indeed, there the semblance of a man was, hefting up a small backpack in his hands. It looked like something a young girl would have on her; from where she was standing, Stacey could almost make out the words embroidered on the face of the bag, but not quite.

If only more of the volunteers were like that jauntily-vested girl, with the hard face and the hard-on for peace art…she was probably as passionate about plants as Stacey was sold on assisting these assholes in Fortune…Taylor, she believed the girl's name was, or maybe it was her last name, a actually, but yeah, she looked as if she could stand to be even a successor for the leading lady, were the other girl to stick around long enough…

…No, no wait, probably not, on second thought. Stacey studied the girl a bit more after stepping off the stage and putting her megaphone down. The tree-hugger's features were way too hard and…

Stacey's attention then shifted as she watched Whittaker approach the Taylor girl with shards culled from his water pipe. Oh, something had to be done!

But the help couldn't come directly from the CURE leader herself. No, it was too dangerous—and Stacey wasn't the heroine sort, not in this world anyway. Certainly she could go and get a security guard who knew of the standard procedure to dispose of such a living disturbance as Brandon.

And besides, the auburn-maned awesomeness that was Miss Forsythe needed to save face anyway, for the sake of CURE; she couldn't risk attracting attention making a scene—what would it look like to have the leader of a peaceful nonprofit brawling it out with one of her own?

Stacey didn't even realize as she was walking across the crowd gathering that she was gravitating exactly towards the place where Brandon had left that small backpack. As a matter of fact, she found herself spilling over the thing, causing the bag's contents to splay out more than they already had been scattered in the first place, causing one large round object to roll a few feet out from the sack.

She shoved the hair from her short ponytail out of her mouth as she tried to regain her composure. That worthless toker must have emptied out almost the entire bag…but what for…

And it was then that Stacey espied the letters on the front of the backpack:

PUFF PUFF.

_Oh, God,_ the thought sped through her head, _Brandon probably saw it and…well, they always did say that the Magic Dragon song was actually a metaphor for marijuana use!_

Impulsively Stacey looked over to where the Taylor girl was; all that was going on was Whittaker showing off fragments of his paraphernalia. How pathetic. And she thought there would be trouble…

The young woman allowed a laugh to chuff through her lungs at all of this. She pressed a palm to a closed eye socket. How completely inane of her assistant! Like, what was in this…little girl's second-grader bag, after all? No…stash, no effing…papers or anything…as if a seven-year-old would be holding, for God's sake! Well, there were drawings, for sure…and a…PSP, for some reason…

Stacey almost started to hum the Puff song as she sat on her rear in the grass, looking to gather together the components of the bag. What other names were in that song?

_Well, it was…Jackie Paper,_ she thought to herself as she found herself scooping up…plastic arms into her hands…_and the land in which the dragon made off to…Hanna Lee?_ She continued to wonder about this, as she looked over a few feet away to see what had rolled off.

It was what appeared to be the diminutive blonde head of a faux little girl.

_Honey Lee?_

"HEY!"

_...Frolicked in the autumn mist...in a land called...damn, what _was_ it called?_

"HEY, YOU!"

She turned the synthetic head over and again in her hands, absently, trying to remember.

_...Frolicked in the..._

"HEY, YOU FUCKING NUTBAR!"

Finally finding her own beauty-blessed head, Stacey shot back towards the sound, she now covering her cheeks with her hands in shock, far too late, she watching as a very unshaven and unkempt remnant of a man approached her with a whiskey bottle…

"YOU STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM…

"…KATEY?!"

The man, all in yellow and saddled with the most muddled of mullets, registered the fact that the "girl"'s head was detached and in the hands of this stranger of a woman.

…then a smash later the man approached Stacey with the jagged, broken handle of a whiskey bottle, making vengefully towards the face the girl strove to save so fervently.

"I'LL MAKE YOU PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO MY DAUGHTER!"

_N…No…_

"NAAAOHHHHH!" the woman blared, raising one hand to her beauteous features and the other in a feeble, futile attempt to ward off her xanthic assailant. As no one from CURE or otherwise came to assist, and as the rather-yellowed Greene descended on the lady's countenance with the horrific flagon fragment in his frenzied fist, one random, almost at this point irrational thought raced across Stacey's mind:

_It was Honah Lee._

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011: 6:17PM

She awoke what felt like millenia later, though it had only been minutes. Stacey put her hands up and found that she could not reach her face.

Through some sort of strange plastic veil, she could note that she was inside some moving vehicle…an ambulance maybe. Gathering strength in her stomach, Stacey forced herself to sit up.

Ahead of her were two men looking very fortyish and very sinister. They had on paramedic uniforms, but they didn't seem to be your average Zombrex-carrying uber-Scandi survivor-saviors, such as the one which a much pleasanter Chuck Greene would encounter in another universe.

"Ah, she's come to," said the one to the other, as neither looked over his shoulder.

"Whrrr?" was all that Stacey could say through the mask. The truck in which she was being conveyed made its way around a corner and into a covert alleyway.

The one who spoke a second past turned fully around now, and Stacey could somewhat make out his vulturey, bespectacled looks through the synthetic shroud. "Mark Bradson," he began. "It looks as if you've sustained quite a bit of damage to your cute little mug."

She wanted to leap forward, to have at this man, and the one beside, to deliver unto them that which was visited upon her.

"Now, now," started the other, who whipped around as well. "Can't have you getting any more agitated. We'd have to sedate you again. I'm Pearce, by the way. Stephens." He thought to extend a hand in salutation, then thought better of it, given the condition of the truck's guest.

"Stacey," said Mark, "we both pertain to a very…special organization. One which, given your present circumstances, you might want to consider joining."

"Given that your 'friends' in CURE weren't really up for helping you out there, with that psycho—and they weren't too keen on stopping us from carting you away—we figured you might want to switch teams to one which is a bit more…loyal to your needs." The other man, Pearce, shot a smug look at the lady behind him as he finished the line.

Then Mark again: "We here at Phenotrans, we're real renaissance men…men of many trades, and masters of them all. Pearce and I, we've been so addicted to, and talented in science that we developed a love for practicing plastic surgery as a hobby. A hobby, can you believe it? Well, you know we're in the right part of America for it, so we figured, why the hell not for a little extra cash?"

Pearce once more: "You see, Stacey, I think you might be very interested in the…quid pro quo that we have to offer. What happened to your face, well…it would cost quite the pretty nonprofit payday to afford. The two of us are willing to offer it to you…for no charge whatever. And we're the best in our line; after all, if you can't trust two guys in facial restoration who are named 'Mark' and 'Pearce,' who can you trust?!"

Stacey still couldn't believe all this as the other two chortled obnoxiously at their terrible jibe, but she found that she couldn't take her bloodied gaze off of the men either. She could only imagine what she looked like under what covered her features now. As a kid, she was teased mercilessly by peers for having rubber-banded braces and oversized glasses—"Facey Soresight," they would all call her, ever so semi-spooneristically –but now, as she felt a veritable fissure caving down the center of her countenance, she imagined those features of her youth to be glamourous gorgeous by contrast.

"We've watched you for a long time. Pheno has wanted you for a while now, someone like you with your…firebrand drive and upstart nature. You'd be a perfect Agent for us…a perfect Agent S."

As Pearce finished again, Mark put in, "Yes…a perfect S…

"_With a perfect ass,_" he added softly to the other man, they both cracking up at this, as if Stacey couldn't pick it up from the foot away that she was from them. It wasn't as if her ears were as all effed up as her…

SEPTEMBER 25, 2011: 3:00PM

_Well, it was okay,_ she thought to herself, of a new mind now. And a new face, as she manned the controls of the safehouse while a once-homeless-looking-turned-faux-Elvis-seeming hero pored over a camera behind her.

_I'll do the both them last of all, and best of all. All the surgeons of the world, with their "Mark"ing and "Pearce"ing, won't be able to do justice to either when I'm through._

She would inform Frank in the coming minutes of the gold-Ijiek-jacketed madman out between the casinos. The one with the dolly daughter, and the perpetual bottle of whiskey in his hand.

An hour after West would go through the vent, Stacey would take a wine bottle the photojournalist had left behind, and smash it hard against the nearby counter, leaving only a neck with jagged glass teeth. Then Agent S (for now still in her CURE guise, of course) made for the vent herself.

"Puff…the Magic…Dra…gon…lived by…the sea…" The tune rang eerily as it echoed through the airduct.

She proceeded along deftly, swiftly, slinkily, hoping that maybe the Willamette wonder would miss the Ijiek idiot, leaving the latter for her to face.

And deface.


	5. Marbles, Then Madness

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "MARBLES, THEN MADNESS: THE SHATTERING OF MASCOT SLAPPY ERNST"

"And remember, kids, always play for fair. No keepsies!"

The mascot with the oversized head and the yet more oversized heart rose up off of his rather slight knees as he said this last to his audience, taking care not to trip over the marbles he laid out on the mall tile. He had just finished another round of shooting ringer with the kids, teaching them an innocent, uncomplicated game that didn't require game controllers or giant carbines, headsets or headshots. Marbles was a magnificent, nonviolent wonder possessing a simplicity and ingenuousness that could captivate any casino plazagoer, no matter what age. The attentive children around Slappy paid his parting words due heed as they all surrounded and giggled and hugged and loved him.

Sighing lightly, Brent Ernst took in the gratifying little fringe benefits of his position at the Palisade once again. It was such fun, in the non-creepiest way possible, to work a job where one of the most prevalent activities was to stand around and be literally embraced by the masses. One didn't need charm, or charisma, or wit, or anything extraordinary to gain that sort of…interpersonal magnetism when one was a mascot. All you really had to do was just stand there, and the people would come to you with arms wide to clasp.

Indeed, Brent had no perverse desire in this. It was just that, for once, he had a role which didn't involve most people running wildly from him.

Diagnosed with Proteus Syndrome at a very early age—the same label as that with which Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) and several yet sparse others had been stuck—Brent Ernst's actual head was as enlarged and as misshapen as the representation of Slappy's own cranium that he wore while working. A condition like that, in a world much more accepting of ideals such as the beautiful blonde and brown-haired young buck of a mogul beside her in the Fortune City TV ads, didn't get one very far in life, no matter how much that person knew or how huge his heart was to rival the size of his head.

No, the disorder with which Brent was slapped constricted the circumference of his world to little more than the roundabout measurement of the marbles with which he constantly played. And so it was that this veritable real-life Slappy had his career options so limited, such that he had to face the world and hide his face from it at the same time, to make a living.

People knew about him. At least some did; well, "everyone knew Slappy," but there were only some who knew Brent, knew about who he was (to the more ignorant, what he was) under the giant mascot mask; he could never be sure as to how many. Did Willa and Terri know, toiling away on their scaffolds at the South Plaza? They were two with whom Brent, or rather Slappy, would fun around a little. Sneaking up ever so furtively on the pair as they worked (when on the floor and not up a story or two off the ground), he inching along almost up on tiptoes, then tapping the ladies' shoulders for them to whirl and see him presenting burgers or fries with the most elaborate of flourishes. For some reason, to which another overly-cranially endowed mascot could attest, stealthily supplying fast food to female construction workers (who most likely only really existed in the two abovementioned mascots' universes and nowhere else, ever) was the most euphoric experience imaginable for the recipients of such very perishable delicacies. Yes, Brent/Slappy rather enjoyed his little "Slap King" jaunts on occasion.

But then there were those who weren't as loving, or as accepting, as the newly-minted marble-minded children or the flourish-flattered laborers.

"Yeah, what're ya here for, you humongous-headed freak?" began the lady wearing the tres-tacky cowboy hat and little else, as she and her…employees, of sorts, loitered atop the faux falls in the center of Palisade Plaza.

Brent said nothing in return, but presented merely the couple thousand he had unbelievably wrested from the hands of chance at the Wheel of Destiny in Atlantica.

"You're kidding me. YOU—you and your novelty-sized noggin want to engage in a…transaction, with one of us?"

"Don't worry about it, Core," started the one with the tied-back hair, sauntering up to her boss, "he's probably packing nothing, overcompensating with one head to make up for the other. He won't be able to transact for s**t with us."

"Uh-huh," nodded the other, with the hair hanging down to her skanky shoulders, in agreement, "Why don't you go off by yourself and live up to your name in private, _Slappy_."

As Brent indeed started off by himself, he looked back wistfully over one shoulder, particularly at Nina Suhr who had said this last to him—really _at_ him. These women couldn't provide what he had really wanted.

Matters worked out for the best, though, in any case. Yea, just as Pygmalion in time rejected the prostitutes of Amathus to instead build his own ideal of a woman in Galatea, so too did "Slappy" Brent Ernst find his own female ideal—in a very literal Special Guest.

Louise Jameson was all he could ever want in a female companion. Innocent, diffident. Pleasant.

Just as victimized by an unusual condition as he was.

While Brent had involuntarily dived head-very-first into the physical oddity he owned, Louise's disorder was of a mental kind, her Down's Syndrome coexisting with his Proteus Syndrome. As such, she was a girl of few words and, like Brent, few opportunities out in the working world because of her condition.

But, magnanimously, miraculously, Kids' Choice came through to give them, as the company's surname suggested, an…option, of sorts, outside of unemployment by way of disability.

All Louise had to do was stand around—sometimes skate around (roller skating a skill at which she was artfully adept despite her Down's)—and pose lovingly as Slappy's "Special Guest." And she fulfilled the role of that Special Guest, in more ways than one, through her special status, through her specialness to the mascot-adoring children…

…and through her specialness to Slappy, both to the character and to the man underneath the giant man-mask who was Brent Ernst.

When the initial several weeks of their Slappy/Special schtick had elapsed, Brent had finally garnered the courage to court the girl, to approach and ask her to a milkshake at Dining at Davey's. The one late morning he was all ready to step right up and put the question to her…

"Sorry, Slappy, but I don't mind if I'd take the 'Special Guest' off your hands for a spell…"

…just like that, Brent's Down's Syndromed-dream went slipping away from his oversized-plastic-handed grasp.

Ticky.

_That dastardly, bastardly fox-headed fink,_ thought Brent, as he wrung his mascot mitts together, not even realizing the menacingly handwringing gestures he was making his character perpetrate right in front of children on near to him. _He has some nerve to waltz right out of his place at Robsaka Digital and whisk Louise away like that. I'll show him…at some point, at least._

And so it was, Ticky (Brent didn't know the underlying costume wearer's real name) with his arrogant fox-like slyness and bravado, Brent with his superlatively counterintuitive determined hesitancy.

The Kids' Choice mascot player never knew how far Ticky would get with his dream girl on a periodic basis. She would show up for work time and again, as fawningly fresh as ever. It didn't seem as if she were affected greatly by the fox-head's finagling overtures.

But every chance he had, Brent would, from a distant, hidden stance, watch the two of them together.

Observing artistic rarities at the Cleroux Collection.

Enjoying decadent selections at the Chocolate Confession.

Shopping for mundane offerings at Chris's Fine Foods…

"What do you think about it, Brent?"

"Uhh…huh?"

The ever-mascot-digs-clad Slappy alter ego turned, during one occasion involving his voyeuristic surveillance of Louise and man assuming Ticky's mantle, to find one who was astronomically more grating and irritating than a massive passel of mascots.

"About the concept of a face behind the mask—or a lack thereof," continued Andy Talbat, oblivious to his child icon acquaintance's reverie of jealousy. Andy was one from the camp which knew of Slappy and knew Brent's name…but didn't know the face lying underneath the mask. "Do you ever think that, like, sometimes the face underneath might be, or perhaps grow to become, just like the representation that lies just above it?"

Brent couldn't be bothered by such aural nonsense as he watched Louise and the Ticky-man absconding from yet another Palisade outlet. He said nothing in return to Andy, but just shook his gargantuan plastic dome in dismay.

"Like, take Spider-Man for instance, right? It's like, you see him in all these issues…sometimes going on and on for issues on end…he can sometimes continually have on that mostly red mask, you know? And it has those big white curved triangles for eyes."

There. Just like that, and Louise and Ticky-man strolled entirely out of sight. Brent wanted to stamp his feet in frustration—or stamp on Andy's.

But the boy beside Brent just went right on with his quizzical tirade. "And, like, if you don't see Peter Parker's face for several pages, or even several issues as I said it happens sometimes, like, you get to thinking, maybe under the mask he doesn't have regular, round brown eyes like you might or I do, but he like has those same white ocular triangles on what would be his real face."

The massive mascot just looked into the distance of the mall-like plaza and sighed deeply.

"This thing I'm talking about, it really applies to so many superheroes…and animated characters otherwise. You know?"

Finally the Kids' mascot turned his character's enormous eyes on Andy. If only the orange-sweatered imbecile could see the _real_ eyes underneath _Slappy's_ mask…

And it was this that Andy ventured next…unfortunately for him.

"It's like, even with you, Brent, like, with Slappy…what if, hypothetically, you had an unbelievably large, deformed head under that mask, with terribly misshapen eyes, and a grotesquely gigantic smile…?"

Again, Andy had never seen Brent outside of his Slappy costume, and no one ever told the young man more about the mascot's representative, so he couldn't have known.

It didn't matter to Brent Ernst, though. Years of pent-up aggravation welled within him.

And in the next moment, plaza people all around could see the lovable Slappy deliver a mighty, mean shove to the hapless talkative twentysomething.

Brent didn't even bother to check if the boy was okay before heading off in the direction which his puppy love and his foxy nemesis had departed.

The Slappy One never found either of them that day…but he was very gratified at his girl's finding him, outside of work days later.

In her usual wordless way, Louise, outside of her Special Guest costume and in the cutest of light brown pigtails, took Brent, still of course in his suit, by the hand and out towards the Silver, then eventually the Platinum Strip.

Crowding costumers thought it was all a promotional gag, as they shadowed the two and snapped their photos more avidly than a certain storied homeless-looking photojournalist states away, but Louise only looked to please one person and no one else.

Reaching the Davey's at last, Louise lounged against a wall outside of the establishment, in a lazy yet alluring sort of way, a sparkle in the young, disabled yet desirable girl's eye. With some effort, she craned her head sideways to indicate some small items down and to the right of her person.

"Skates…" Brent started, looking down at the wheeled footwear, "you want…me to…skate with you…"

Louise said nothing, as usual, but nodded excitedly in response.

Brent's smile underneath the Slappy mask exceeded the width of his mascot's perpetual ghastly grin as he ran over to a pair of roller skates to put them on. A couple of minutes later and Louise twirled and whirled while Brent sprawled and crawled, both on their skates.

Standing shyly over the localized Slappy, the girl giggled with a hint of playful pity. She didn't care if Brent weren't adept at her forte—she would take delightful pleasure in teaching him how it was done.

Carefully, delicately, Louise extended both her hands to grasp one of her companion's, and with a great tug or two she helped him begin to get to his feet. Brent crooked Slappy's massive plastic head with the effort of getting his top-heavy form back to being fully upright.

Of course, then came the precarious bounce or two, with arms flailing around, in a desperate attempt by Brent to keep his balance.

But Louise met this more than readily with a huge hug that made the man underneath the mascot blush and almost bawl with the most tender of emotion.

For a few fleeting minutes, the two cavorted, their weight entirely on tiny wheels, Louise laughing lovingly and Brent/Slappy spreading his teeth in abject joy, both on and underneath the mask.

And it was then, at that precise moment, that the most intimate of warmth gave way to the coldest of sendoffs.

[PAK, PAK, PAK]

Brent suddenly found Slappy's back attacked by a heaping helping of peltings by…seeming…

…snowballs?

This time of year?

The Slappy-man turned suddenly to see the Ticky One maliciously leveling his snowball cannon once again.

_And he would do this right in front of Louise, right with her in the line of his fire…_

In an instant the Kids Choice mascot raised both his arms protectively, shielding his girl with his torso too, the young man imbued now with an extraordinary sense of balance which arrived perhaps by way of adrenaline. Hopefully it would fuel him with the strength to match…

[PAFT, PAFT, PAFT]

…Brent took the brunt of the wintry assault with his mascot's upper body, absorbing the snowballs with his synthetic chest and abdomen mostly. This bought the lovely Louise enough time to skate away, to find cover against the snowy offensive within Davey's.

Sensing that his love had slipped away in self-preservation, Brent turned to follow her—

-only to find himself once again spinning vertically, head over Slappy ass, tumbling down to the ground for the umpteenth time today on account of small spheres of a different kind…smaller spheres to which the children's idol was all too accustomed.

"Marbles, Tick? Really?" was all Brent could get out, as the Ticky-man approached him, the former of course decked out in his own mascot suit. People surrounded them all around, many still thinking this was all some kind of strange act of advertisement for Kids' and Robsaka.

"Unlike you, Slapmaster, I'm not playing for fair."

By this point, the fox was standing above the other, the former's pointed-eared head looming large over the latter's supine form.

"I'm playing for keeps."

Well, thought Brent/Slappy, two could play at that histing game.

He clutched the improvised marble rifle to his synthetic chest, still of course visible from behind the Ragazines kiosk, but doing the best he could to perpetrate stealth—and seemingly succeeding as he espied the Ticky-man and Louise, decked out in her alluring Special Guest suit, the both of them stepping out of the Kids' Choice.

Brent felt as if he himself had no choice. He'd have to show up his rival in order to win back his girl's respect. He wouldn't of course, aim for the Ticky suit directly; he could hurt the other young man, and more importantly to Brent, make himself look like a fiend in front of Louise. So, like the Tickster did out in Platinum, he aimed for the floor near to his enemy in love and commercialistic war.

Just a few more seconds and he'd have his shot lined up. Slappy'd wished he'd fitted a scope on his modified water gun, perhaps even ordered and taken that drug Solid Snake used in at least the first MGS iteration to slow his heart rate…something-a-pam or whatever…but this shot was infinitely more critical than anything the fabled Foxhounder ever endeavored to attempt.

Looking through the eyeholes of his Slappy suit didn't make matters any easier. He could still make out the Ticky-man leaning over to Louise, though, his fuzzy face going for a pretend kiss on her plastic cheek.

Before any smooching or shooting could commence, however…

[SPBANG…AAAAAAAAAARGH! AAAAAAAGGGHHH!]

The Slappy-man whisked around towards the sound, emanating from a distance away and beneath him. Rushing to his feet and momentarily forgetting about Louise for what must have been the first time in many months, he hurried over a few store-lengths and looked over and through the second floor Palisade railing nearest him.

He couldn't describe the ambling, shambling…semblances of humans that were issuing forth from Atlantica. Brazenly they mowed through the crowds of customers, grabbing healthy humans, gorging themselves on their victims, and consequently conscripting them into their own ranks within minutes. Being used to plaza acts for given enterprises, Slappy, as with the casinogoers during the Davey's incident, thought for a fleeting instant that this was some sort of show, and not the reality of terror that was overtaking the Palisade more and more by each passing moment.

[UHHHHHHHHHH!]

Brent could recognize Louise's voice from a marathon away. He knew, especially muffled underneath her plastic head covering, that she was shrieking in fright.

As swiftly as he could, Slappy cantered over towards the Kids' Choice. He reached the end of the plaza just in time to see a swath of the incoming creatures, who must have entered from the Yucatan (Plaza, not Peninsula), overtaking and overeating on the person that was once the Ticky-man. Three or four or five of them were presently making a Tick-Sandwich—a serving that proved to be much less palatable than any sam'mich involving, say, a master/mistress of unlocking in a related Capcom universe.

Despite his rivalry, Brent ran as fast as he could, given his costume and just his oversized head generally, to try and wrest the monsters off and away from his mascotty competition. Part of him, admittedly, was still of a selfish mind, hero fantasies firing off in his brain as he could potentially become the savior of his girl as well as his enemy. Part of him imagined the Ticky-man rousing himself to his feet once the other mascot rescued him, and the two of them putting aside their differences like dual dragons of decades past, joining forces to take on the recently returned dead. They could be fellow superheroes—Slaps/Tick, they could call themselves.

All this ran through Brent's mind as he tried in vain to get around the crowd of creatures, as if he were an impotent Frank West or Rebecca Chang, unable to claw his or her way in enough to get that much needed scoop. No, after a few more fast seconds, all Slappy would be able to scoop from the floor were the fleshy leftovers of what was once the Ticky-man.

And up until mere instants ago, Louise was relatively safe from the alighting evil beings, she cowering in the causeway corner near to the Kids' Choice, not yet a target of the terrible undead interlopers.

But Brent couldn't quite get to his feet fast enough when the herd of lurching human-lunchers set their sights on her.

He'd did all he could, lowering his massive plastic head and charging in like one of the abovementioned Spider-man's oldest adversaries. The Slappy-man, however, didn't have that enemy's horns, or his girth. Or his thick gray skin.

The coldest of vice grips held Brent back as creatures from behind accosted him. With a mighty heave, he shook them off, and focused his gaze back on Louise just as the things ahead of him piled atop his girl and made more cannibalistic chow for themselves, all out of the Special Guest.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" or rather, "NMMMMMMMMMMMMM!" cried Brent, he too muffled from his head mask, as he then began to shoot haphazardly with his marble rifle at the things. The small spheres just ricocheted off of his foes, though, and they didn't even turn to notice as they continued on their way.

It was all the Slappy One could do at that point to fend for his own distorted self. With sniffling grunts he managed to get into and barricade himself within the Kids' Choice. In time he would muster the courage to push himself over to the High Noon and fit himself with enough explosives and other arms to outlast the outbreak, hopefully.

And he knew he would need to upgrade his water/marble guns, somehow. He'd need a stronger substance to supplement the oncoming firefights with the creatures converging on his position in the plaza.

All he could do to keep his sanity, throughout most of the ordeal, was obsess about the one thing other than Louise, and that was his beloved mastery of marbledom.

To comfort himself in the horror all around him Brent thought of aggies and crockies and other kinds of tiny ornate balls used for the pursuit. Steelies. Chalkies. Flinties.

Flame marbles.

It was at that moment that the Slappy-man began to hatch his most effective offensive on the monsters around him. In a minimal bit of minutes he'd gather all he'd needed to survive.

During the course of his preparations, he'd spotted, on a screen in a random corner of the casinos, the footage of the fool who'd apparently caused all this mess and massacre.

And he'd told himself right then that he'd meet that man, plastic head to motorcycle helmet, and most assuredly play for keeps.

(I hope people enjoyed this story. Any questions or comments, I can be reached at ).


	6. The Looters and the Loco Zoco

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "THE LOOTERS AND THE LOCO ZOCO"

(CHAPTER ONE)

The air several paces ahead of the pharmacy counter seemed a bit too tranquil for Denyce's liking. She didn't know a hundred percent what was going on exactly, just in the last couple of hours.

She did know some kids out there were going to start becoming desperate, though, and so the pharmacist had to think fast.

Indeed, only so many outlets away, three young hoods continued their skulk along Royal Flush to get to Roy's. Each was clutching his most preferred weapon, and each took to naming himself after said implement to preserve the secrecy and security of their group.

Flashlight shined the object he prized in the other two's faces as they pumped along. "Look alive, boys," he admonished. "Have a feeling our chance for the score will be past soon…we need to keep it moving."

The next Looter, who hugged his tomahawk close to him, would come off to the average survivor as the most nervous of all. He had good reason to be. "Just…just as long as we c-can get what we need in time."

"Man, are you sure you didn't take any of that stuff?!" The third Looter was the surliest of all to be sure. The crowbar-brandishing brigand gritted as they all made their way. "You certainly sound as if you're hopped up on something."

"Hey, believe me!" cried Tomahawk, waving his weapon out to the side in exasperation. "I hafta imagine it's like just the three of us left who haven't shot up on that garbage!"

The thoughts began to cross the minds of the trio once more. What was worse, in their view, than the flesh-eaters invading, what was worse than seeing ordinary humans being devoured, was watching those they knew and cared for succumbing to various ill effects of the drug that was being circulated all around Fortune. And it was something even more addictive, in every way, than plain old garden variety Zombrex.

Flashlight sniffed. "Well, the three of us, and the other Loots as well. Gotta have a clear head to be able to run a business, after all…and that's just what we're gonna do, once we finally rid ourselves of this labcoat chick."

"She's sure been a pain in our ass for the longest time now," said Crowbar, swinging the object in front of him in a brief fantasy of dealing his own brand of justice to the pharmacist.

Tomahawk's breathing deepened to the point where he believed he was hyperventilating. This was not lost on the other two young men.

"Man, keep it together!" shouted Flashlight, as he firmly knocked his item across the arm of the jittery Looter alongside him. This shocked the hatchet-bearer back into a sort of stasis. The light-carrier, meanwhile, rattled the batteries inside his own implement in anticipation. "Yep…she's gonna give us what's rightly ours…had enough with this lady through and through."

The three of them were finally starting to turn the corner to Roy's; Denyce could see them in outline from within the safety of the pharmacy. Anxiously she reached into her coat for her cell phone, and punched in some functions quickly, before these boys could come in.

In a huff she then looked around, looked to the shampoo on the shelves, looked to the phony large perfume props on the smaller tables at the front of Roy's, cursed softly. There were no longer any really useful weapons lying around. She had to think, what to do.

She honestly didn't know what was more dangerous: these new ghouls sauntering aimlessly all around the Flush, or humans who were vengeful and looking to vent on her and the store she so meticulously maintained.

Finally the young woman sighed long and dejectedly, and resigned herself to her fate. As she looked in abject futility at the door to the side of her, which felt far too far away, Denyce reflected. She couldn't believe that it had reached this point. She really thought she had it all under control…

(CHAPTER TWO)

When the outbreak had struck the enterprising entropy of entertainment that was Fortune City, Denyce was at first affected like anyone else was, with a pastiche of horror, awe, and dread.

Then the young woman saw opportunity.

If the town were really going to hockey sticks in a handbasket, she might as well exploit it for all it was worth, she figured.

Before the unliving made their stay in Fortune, Denyce was largely all about peddling the preferred pharmaceuticals of the day, just about all over-the-counter. She had always harbored her own side dreams, though, of profiting from her own little magic-pill inventions—although she just sought to help others locally and gain a reputation through making her own minor under-counter sales—she was too afraid of trying to patent anything, should there be any ill side effects from them, of which she was unaware, that might harm or kill off an entire population. Denyce derived the idea for her little inventions upon witnessing the concoction and ingestion of a special tablet, designed and distributed by and between various peers of her in pharmacy school, which would allow users to remain awake, uninhibited by fatigue, for twenty-four hours. When she learned how easy it was to make these, with the abilities she had, she figured, why the heck not? Just doing it on a small scale wouldn't make too much of an impact.

So she really took her hobby of tooling around with pharmaceuticals to the next level when she managed to get ahold of a certain score of the crank-iest, and most commonly crystal-ized, drug out there, and fuse its contents (which for her were ready-made in liquid, injectable form) with those of that infamous temporary cure, the literal everyday savior, Zombrex.

Denyce was part Hispanic by blood, and from the time she could walk to the present, she spent much of her conscious hours in various malls and mall-like places. In homage to this, she named her new baby Zocalo, Spanish for "mall" or "shopping center" and consistent with the Z-ness of Zombrex.

And, once customers came to Roy's asking desperately for something to take a bit of edge off, yet keep them stimulatingly ahead of the undead packs loping after them, Denyce had just the ticket.

As far as Flashlight knew, there were few more dramatically affected by the Zocalo addiction epidemic than Gordon Dawkins. "G-Dawk," as many locals lovingly called him (in reference to a similarly-beloved NFL player on the East Coast), had indeed excelled, himself, in sports such as football, as well as track, the latter both winter and spring; no one could outrun or catch the man when he was determined, which was all the time. Not content to just burn out or fade away after his teenage glory days, the man set his sights on the pigskin pros; when he unfortunately realized that that bridge was a bit too far for him, he settled for the military, opting for the National Guard as a compromise with his overly protective parents so he could more likely be close to the Moms and Pops. Make no mistake, though: Gordon was no Mama's or Papa's Boy in essence, and he was as tough as he was fleet; the way he took down neighborhood hicks Derrick, Deetz, and a couple of other D-named degenerate D-bags when they tried to pick off some brothas at a local park (with paintball guns—nothing lethal, but still), he became a hero in Fortune for all to admire.

Now, though, just a few weeks later and so as days into a Zocalo habit, developed from overwhelming anxiety Gordon harbored in his endeavors to protect his mother, father, and his woman LaShawndra from the incoming ghouls (despite the fact that the man's lady didn't exactly need any protecting, given her overall demeanor)—the hero had since been reduced to a husk. Flashlight could swear he caught sight of the man, once swaggeringly proud and taking down the faces of some fools at the moment, and the names of others for future reference…now he was cowering behind a kiosk in the Flush, grabbing at a rolled-up newspaper ever so defensively and pathetically, his eyes damningly dilated, his limbs overcome with the shakes. He was a different person, all due to the Zocalo. And before this, people would shower him with gifts and even straight-on cash just for the assured short-term promise of his serving our country as a soldier. After Denyce's drug, those people found that they were funding his addiction.

Flashlight was one of those people. For all of this, the Looter wanted to shine his prized, weaponized object into Denyce's face and follow up with the business end of the object.

(CHAPTER THREE)

Whereas young men possibly predisposed to thuggery might strike out and harm others through far simpler means, such as bludgeoning would-be victims with heavy handheld objects, Denyce preferred a far subtler, yet far more destructive route.

When it was reported a couple of months back that the elderly in Fortune were more susceptible to a possible rash of pneumonia—and at this point, this was the worst, beyond the oncoming undead, that people such as Tomahawk had to dread or fear—Denyce again saw a chance to get customers ever more onto her homegrown substances. It was devious, it was diabolical, and it would most likely have landed her in one of the lowest circles of an unpleasant afterlife, but hey…she only lived once, and from the looks of things it appeared that Hell had moved residence to various hapless burgs in the United States, what with the oncoming recently deceased coming back en masse. Perhaps there was nothing left but Heaven after this life anymore because of that, she figured from what she was seeing around her.

And so another step in Denyce's agenda was to subvert the geriatric to her will by substituting the liquidized Zocalo for the vaccines for which the old farts clamored. She recalled one more than the others, a determined-looking spinster sort in a plum-hued outfit. Time and again she would raise her fist at the pharmacist, banging her umbrella on the counter at Roy's for her shots.

_Yeah,_ thought Denyce sardonically as she prepped the syringe for Old Miss Alwin's use, _in Capitalist America…Umbrella bangs you._

(And yes, although the Zombrex was indeed created by Phenotrans, both the pneumonia vaccine, as well as some of the illicit Zombrex-blending methamphetamines that Denyce managed to score of late, had emanated from employees of that parasol-named corporate parasite of the American people.)

It was within about a day of Esther's last visit to the Flush pharmacy that Tomahawk had noticed some serious changes in his great-grandmother. She was always so pleasant to him and other members of his clan, yet always so sharp. Despite pushing a century in age, the woman still had control of all her faculties…at least, that was, until her latest shot.

But Tomahawk fondly remembered it now, as he squeezed on the eponymous weapon he wielded, looked back on the earlier moments in his life and allowed the slightest of grins to play on his lips. Geege (his abbreviation for great-grandmother) Esther always had her heart in the right place, even if she managed to get him the wrong stuff for Christmas every year. He asked for a plastic Tyrannosaurus one year and received a stick pony instead. He wanted a toy helicopter and she instead bought him a tricycle. The boy wanted to lose his marbles in more ways than one, after Geege gave him that very toy the following year.

Then, as the young man matured and he witnessed the woman entering into her nineties, he became much more sensitive to her presence in his family. Apparently having sensed a growing connection between herself and the boy, Esther in turn gave him an invaluable family heirloom: as the kindly lady was half Navajo, she retained much of that people's artifacts. It was another Christmas in which her great-grandson had expected another tacky toy from her when she bestowed upon him the item from which he now took his alternate identity, and which he now turned over in his hands.

In the ensuing years, turnabout made it so that Tomahawk started buying gifts for Esther in appreciation for her always being there for him. The plum coat that she always wore…a byproduct of her great-grandon's generosity. On some occasions, he would even just give her money straight-on.

Then he stopped when he found out where the cash was all going, in the last few weeks.

_That money-hungry mothereffer will pay for getting Geege strung out on the Loco Zoco,_ the thought now ran through his mind. Although Tomahawk didn't run a chemical test on the alleged vaccine his beloved matriarch had taken, he figured it couldn't have been anything else. Completely oblivious to any danger to her person, Esther Alwin had been stalking store outlets even as the undead skulked all around her, she bathed in a Zocalo-based delusion and seeking the same gifts she procured for her precious little one some fifteen-odd years ago.

Well, for that, Tomahawk promised, he would have for Denyce a gift of his own…just for her.

(CHAPTER FOUR)

As if a certain target demographic were not enough for the pharmaceutical maven, Denyce soon spread her net of physiological influence ever farther.

Studies showed that a certain competitor of the socially-energizing drink Red Bull—the Thistle Donkey, named after the popular stuffed animal that no one in the Southwestern United States could go to get away from—had skyrocketed in sales, due to a certain character of taste and level of accessibility that made the purple potable more appealing than its incumbent crimson counterpart. As a result, anyone from kids trying to stay awake in social studies classes, to retirees collecting social security checks, who "Drank Up The Ass," as the donkey-friendly slogan chirped on television. Denyce was well aware of this, and, using a very fine, careful syringe, managed to pierce containers of Donkey, near the top of each can and inject in a liquid form of Zocalo in the airspace near the pulltab. The point of the needle she used was so fine that no puncture was even noted—and, of course, it didn't hurt for her to use a certain adhesive on the cans after the fact—the ingenious glue being invented by none other than local shut-in internet whiz Wallace Hertzog, and being given to Denyce in exchange for a failed date.

Tens, then hundreds of unfortunate Fortuners bought and drank the amphetamine-adulterated mixtures. Among them was Jared Davis, a psychopath when it came to partying, and the best friend of the crowbar-bearing Looter now converging on Roy's.

Jared and Crowbar went back several, several seventy-two-hour periods, all the way back to childhood basically. All the trouble they would get in, the shenanigans they would pull in the casino resorts. One time, Jared sweet-talked Helen Bonner, who was minding the register at Hat Racks, into taking a smoke break out in one of the maintenance rooms with him. He left Crowbar to mind the register, and boy did the latter ever relish his own de facto running of that store for all of twenty minutes. The boys got away with what they did, as the lonely and rather needy Bonner wasn't one to snitch. It left Davis with an afternoon's gratification and the other one with fantasies of running his own store—filled with nothing less than pirated, black-market contraband, of course. He could envision the chainlinked barrier that separated him from his chump customers now.

But personally, between the two of them, it was Jared who was ever more insane. Another incident, at the Albert's, in which the partyer whisked a centurion head off a shelf, held it down at groin level, and thrust repeatedly at the bust—and this right in front of the store manager.

And Jarry was always the one to kiss the girls and make them faint, ever since elementary school. Crowbar would joke in the last couple of years that his friend was still basically going for girls of roughly the same age, as the Devilish Davis would seek to rob the teenage cradle even though he was now in his late twenties. The one who always seemed to get away was that cute blonde Kalee Timmons; Jared obsessed about her to no end. Crowbar rolled his eyes repeatedly when Jared talked about it being "Timmons Time"—which was basically all the time, when the swinger would check her Facebook page, post on her wall even.

The Looter remembered Jared now as he continued to pound the foot and a half of steel into his palm again and again. He thought about how his friend was very much out of sorts these days, bouncing off the walls in a bad way since he had been Drinking Up The Ass constantly. Crowbar thought Jar had been fixated on Kalee before—now the young man's belly was never full of her, as a destitute photojournalist in Colorado might have once put it. He chased after the poor girl like a rage-infected anymore, and he would pay his friend absolutely no mind; there was no getting through to him.

The worst part about it, now, Crowbar knew, was that the last he saw of Kalee Timmons, the girl was completely turned around—in a really unfortunate, undead-turned sort of way. And as Jared was beyond help, he wasn't headed for the relative soft landing of a restraining order or stalker's prison time, but rather an unpleasant "love bite" from the object of his affection.

No, actually, on second thought, the worst part of it, Crowbar decided, as his eyes fixed on the door to Roy's, was that he had unwittingly enabled his friend these past few weeks. All the spare dollars he lent to his best friend…he never knew that he was funding a Zocalo addiction.

After getting date-jilted genius Wallace to test out a can of the Donkey, Crowbar's fears and frustrations were confirmed.

And he knew now just whom to take it all out on.

(CHAPTER FIVE)

As established, hours into her shift Denyce could feel a disturbance coming on to complicate her already stress-heightened routine. She then overheard the faintest bickering from outside between what sounded like three delinquents, and looked to the office to the side. Would she have enough time to get to her taser, in the drawer in there? Wallace designed one specially for her, which she always kept in her purse; it was shaped like a pink massager, but it let out the most vicious little electric coil. The "tasesager" was never absent from her purse when she went out—especially when attending small "exchanges" on the street to acquire "ingredients" for some of her concoctions. How careless the pharmacist was now, to have left her pocketbook back in there.

It was just the rounding of another corner which separated the three from the Roy's.

"Should we, uh…do up the place a bit, from the outside, before we head in?" asked the one bearing the foot-and-some of bent-around iron. "Perhaps use that green spray can over there to mark our territory over the door…toss a trash can through a display window…"

"…Dr-drive that orange car right through the entrance!" interjected Tomahawk, as he pointed to the megafine sports auto perched between some rows of slots. "At'll make our appearance over in'ere real pronounced!"

"You know howta hotwire one of them things, genius?" Crowbar shot back sharply.

"Guys," put in Flashlight, turning the eponymous device on a second to shine straight at the double doors to the pharmacy, "let's just stay on task. We can maybe rip crap up once we're in…but for the sake of being relatively inconspicuous to any authority still lurkin' around…let's just hang loose in the entry." Crowbar shurgged and Tomahawk nodded shakily.

The need for the two more subordinate Looters to bring down the outlet was satisfied some trashed computer monitors, cash registers, and perfume props later. All this becoming strewn all over the floor of the Roy's certainly gained the attention of the bewildered Denyce.

The trio's de facto leader thumped his flashlight into his open palm. "You know, lady, this isn't gonna just be about us lootin' your store…you know that, right?"

The pharmacist began slowly backing away from the main counter, focusing her peripherals on the door to her left. Could she dash for her handbag in time…?

Most likely not. "I don't…what do you want from me? I'm herpes positive, you know…"

"Heh, heh, you probably are!" chuffed Crowbar, banging his signature weapon against a shelving nearby, tubes of shampoo cascading down. "But we're not here for that."

"W-we wouldn't wanna be within a mile of you, if it weren' for what you've been doin' these last few weeks or more," put in Tomahawk from the rear flank. "You know…th-the Loco Zoco."

Denyce's brow constricted as her eyes fixed on Flashlight.

"I've just been giving these people what they've wanted," she said. Then she took a firm step forward. "Some…some desired an escape from all the madness around us…so I gave it to them. Sure, it might have made them a bit excitable, but…"

"Ex_cit_able?" the head Looter spat, shining his light in the pharmacist's face. "You brought down a local hero, someone who could have served our country, someone who was an inspiration to _all_ of us…and you think something like that can be shrugged off as just a side effect?"

"And what about the people who never wanted to take the Zoco?" added Crowbar, raising his own personal object menacingly. "The people who just…had it injected in their crap, without them knowing? I got a friend who's likely been tryin' to jump the bones of an effin'…ghoul girl as we speak!"

"Yeah, and my Geege, too!"

Everyone turned around and looked back at Tomahawk with a quizzical look.

"My…my Great-Granny, I mean." A beat; then Tomahawk pointed his weapon at Crowbar to clarify. "Well, I don't think Jarry's trying to jump _her_ bones…'least, he better not be. I mean…"

The other Looter just shook his head as he, and then a moment later Flashlight and Tomahawk

focused their attention once more on Denyce.

This, of course, took the Looters' attention away from the entrance at the rear of the store. Out there, beyond the translucent doors, Denyce now noticed a black-and-yellow-clad motocrosser who looked all too familiar from the TV set. He, Denyce thought most hypocritically and ironically, was that utter psycho who was responsible for turning everything upside down here. Fervently the yellow/black hero beat an undead one down with a small square sign, then made for the door to Roy's…only to be pulled back by another oncoming ghoul.

That psycho, she figured, could make for much more trouble…or he could be her way out. "Look," Denyce said, stalling, "you can do what you want. But I know you want some…collateral…in addition to my comeuppance. And you won't get anything unless I tell you where it is."

Crowbar heard tell of a sizeable hoard of dough inside some safe hidden in the back. He then thought of the money he had given to Jared…_and_ the money Tomahawk said he gave to his Geege…_and_ the money Flashlight had donated to the Dawk.

In light of all that, the money Denyce had hoarded here, as far as the Looters were concerned, really _did_ belong to them.

"Well, we'll just," and the Looter slammed his implement down on the counter to punctuate, "redecorate a bit more, in here, till you feel like coming around to telling us."

The pharmacist said nothing to this, but just commenced to cowering and huddling as humbly as she could. The other two Looters rummaged around, pushing utility carts and throwing items to the floor. "Hey!" Crowbar shouted about a minute later, again banging his weapon on the counter. "I know you're holding out on us! Where's the money?! Where's the safe?!"

He then reached over for Denyce, grabbing her by the wrist. "Come on! Don't lie to me!"

"We don't have a safe!" The once-devious look in Denyce's eyes was, to Crowbar, completely disappeared, and replaced by a wide-eyed gawk, as if the pharmacist had suddenly become possessed by the child of a chickenheart.

"Don't lie to…"

"Hey! Dirtbag!"

(CHAPTER SIX)

Several minutes and three dead Looters later, the latter's eponymous flashlight, tomahawk, and crowbar scattered across the pharmacy floor like so much human waste, Denyce found herself being escorted from the Roy's by the mysterious motorcyclist Chuck Greene. He had told the young woman of the safehouse and of their destiny to reach it in the ensuing moments.

Denyce looked back at Roy's Mart one more time as she set off with Chuck, thinking about the next step. _I'll have to abandon the main stockpile for right now,_ she thought whimsically, _but that's alright_._ Not unlike so established drug lords and mob bosses, even after being picked up I can operate from the inside. I have…packages that can come to me._

And as the pharmacist was led away, she thought of the small Zocalo packages tied up in ribbon on the floor of the Casual Gals, where a once-honored hero of the town was seen hiding last week before all this undead mess…she thought of the small packages ribboned on the floor of the Small Fry Duds, next door to the toy store that near-centenarian had frequented the past several days.

She thought of the larger set of packages she had stashed away at Kathy's Space, which she was sure those shopaholic Zocalo addicts would retrieve for her. Erica Mayes had called her earlier in the day; especially now that they were all whacked out on the Zoco, those three were crazy enough to go hunting for deals even now in the midst of this crisis—another trio of looters, in essence, really. Surely they would be able to bring her auxiliary meth-laced Zombrex supply to the safehouse when they were found; Denyce called it in, after all, before the Looters even came through the door.

_Maybe too,_ she thought, _those girls would even have Chuck carry it for them personally._


	7. Terri Hat Sunrise

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "TERRI HAT SUNRISE"

There were far less than tenable designs on the mind of Justin Tetherford at the moment. He glanced at the wire, suspended from the ceiling and curled into a vicious noose, he now waiting behind the improvised walls for his rival to show.

It was hours into the new day, around four in the morning. There were these strange…lollygaggers haunting all around now, and in his insanity Justin did not recognize them for the nonliving nightmares that they were. He just thought, ever so obsessively, of the tryst that was going to take place between that scrub Ray Teller and his (that is, Justin's) own Terri Glass. The young man knew, though, that she wore her plaid apparel so scantily just for him, and not for Ray, _never_ for Ray. It was all a continual tease, one orchestrated to yoke him in, to catch her a real man—not to snap up pullover-clad pansies like Ray, that was for damn sure.

Justin recalled it well, he and his ex-friend, the Tether and the Teller just two weeks previous, toiling to erect displays at the clothing outlet in the up-and-coming South Plaza. He was putting up a particularly impressive endcap, showcasing the brightest and whitest of men's briefs, when he first noted the girl across the way, she working the scaffolds along with a fellow worker, some…wildebeest of a woman or other.

He was instantly enraptured by the sight of the woman. Her flesh shone lovely olive. The jeans, adorning her hips and legs so snugly, looking as if they could shed like the skin of the desert's most delectable diamondback. The florid red plaid draped across her upper torso, a pattern propped like an elaborate valentine for adults, scantily across the top half of her body. The orange hard hat cresting her scalp as if a brilliant orange mini-sun had decided to set, or perhaps rise, atop her, in honor of her magnificence. The silvery protractor protruding from her back pocket, seemingly beckoning him to come forth and prostrate himself in worship of her erotically imposing person.

The sight of Terri Glass was not lost on Ray Teller either, as the other man also gaped in abject awe at the Comely Countess of Construction. When Justin looked across at his buddy, Ray looked away, as if he had suddenly lost interest.

But the damage was irrevocably done upon both men. In the course of building that day, Terri had unwittingly begun the demolition of the bond between the men who would look upon her. The Tether had a feeling in the back of his mind that this was the case, and he hushed up the part of his conscience hollering at him to squash any emotions for the woman before him; such an infatuation could only make for trouble. When Terri returned the young man's gaze for an instant, and registered the slightest glower of annoyance at his ogling, Justin had to look away sharply, wishing that he could bury his head or wear a bag over it in shame.

He could swear, he would die with a bag over his head, if it meant that he could regain a single bit of grace regarding his place in the world of she whom he could come to know as Terri Glass.

The ensuing days passed by quickly, as if they were only two hours long each. What made them fly in such a fashion was the continual sight of the sparingly-swathed hard hat who had his heart. Justin squeezed his hand in frustration as he looked to the girl, then to her elephantine ally there on the scaffold; if only he could be there, suspended several feet from the ground, situated next to someone who could make his blood boil, who could make his heart race so! But the young man hadn't the gumption or the guts to go beyond gawking at any girl who moved him in this way.

Unfortunately for him, his undies acquaintance did figuratively possess that greater pair that existed under the intimate apparel that the two men were supposedly soon to hawk at the South. Justin watched helplessly, one unfortunate evening, as Ray took it upon himself to break for a moment and book for the pair of ladies.

It was all too mortifying to watch. Again, Justin felt as if he could die right there, hanging his head in such shame.

When Ray returned about a third of an hour later: "I got a little coffee…liaison with the skinny one when we knock off," he said.

Justin couldn't believe it. He had lain eyes on the girl before Ray, and now…

"She said she wouldn't go anywhere without Willa, so I offered to bring you along as well."

Teller didn't even have to relate who that was for the other man to know instantly the abomination of whom he spoke.

And that other man continued to feast his eyes on the erogenous erector, oblivious that there was another one, with an entirely different kind of hat, who was taking a gander upon his own person.

So it was that some days after Justin had first fixed a look on Miss Glass, and after said insufferable coffee encounter, that he found himself lying down very close to Terri at last.

Unfortunately, the young man's state of semi-supineness involved his being configured most uncomfortably in the rear mini-flatbed compartment of Terri's trusty orange Industry cart. A vehicle which the hardy girl was steering through the South just at the moment.

And guess who was in the passenger seat alongside her.

"Ray," the T-Square Temptress began, looking off to the left as she drove, "it's so nice to get away from the worksite, if only for a brief spell, you know."

"Yeah…it's a shame that Willa couldn't come with us after all."

"Well, you know, we only really have room for three here…and what with her leg and all…it just wasn't practical."

Justin had to endure all the banter from his buddy, in addition to the bumping at the back of the cart. When they passed an acetylene tank lying on the floor at one juncture, the young man thought about toppling out and taking a whiff from the long container, to end it all.

Then he caught sight of the colossal centurion statue a few meters later, with its sword held mightily aloft, and certain thoughts began to creep into his curmudgeonly cranium. _Why snuff out my life, and leave the Teller all alone with her, when…_

"I'm sure you saw what was done in the front, with the Fortune Lobby."

Ray paused a second at Terri's comment, then realized that she was referring to the front of the Hotel, adjacent to South. "Oh…yeah, of course. We all go through there to get to our respective grinds!" At this last, he playfully elbowed the girl's neighboring arm. Justin could barely make this out from his complicatedly-contorted position behind them.

_ How dare her beautiful arm, the hue of which is immaculate parchment, a canvas upon which I would design, no…author my own…American revolution of sexual awakening…how dare that luscious limb be sodden—SPOILED by the pasty-ass probing of that…that endcap-erecting peon!_

It was all fleeting figments such as these which haunted the other man's mind, which (true to his name…kind of) tethered Justin to the moment in a most Tartaruslike fashion. This was the worst of eternal punishments, condensed into several minutes and a speeding mallcart.

"But I want to show you, break down for you what was done by us…by Willa and me."

Terri quickly delivered on this intention as the Industry spun abruptly into the Fortune Hotel Lobby. As the red-flanneled blue-collar maiden pointed around the area to show off the paneling job that she and her handy yet hefty cohort had effected in that hallway, Justin could only look around at how many objects he could espy that he would liked to have seen smothered over the head of Ray Teller. _That brown-gold garbage can looked like it would do the trick…or perhaps the giant water bottle atop the cooler over there; would need to cut open the bottom of the container a bit more, of course, but it's made of a great substance for suffocating…maybe fitting one of the vases over his airways; the large one; no, the small one…_

"You know," began Terri once more, leaning in a bit closer to Ray now as she spoke, "I really would love to be here at some point…alone…with my…" and then Justin could swear he heard next the epithet that he himself gave to Ray, and which his goddess was now granting upon the Teller.

_Most Hairiest._

The girl only whispered it, but the Tether knew that she said.

"Most Hairiest" was a dubious, intentionally redundant title which Justin had bestowed upon Ray at times when they would get intoxicated, get almost completely undressed, and try on packets of the underwear that they stacked from time to time. Without his usual pullover on, Ray—who actually was a closet bodybuilder—resembled a wan version of the Incredible Hulk—the Honky Hulk, to Justin—just as much as he looked like Bill Bixby, or the eighties actor who played the Green Goliath's counterpart Bruce Banner, in the face. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry…or hungry…or in my undies," Ray would ramble on aimlessly, kiddingly, while they were in their stupor.

Now, Justin pontificated while he continued to jolt and jostle in the rear of the Industry cart on the way back to work, he wondered whether he would like Ray Teller ever again, in any context.

Or whether the other man would even live long enough to be liked or not, on another shift beyond today.

In the shadows, another wondered the same regarding the odds of survival of a particular young skinny rip whom he had fully in his sights.

It was now four in the morning on the 27th…and, to be sure, some underwear preparer's life would indeed soon come to an abrupt end.

"Justin, I don't know why you…you know about all the…things that are loping about around here, in this place, right?"

But the Tether said nothing. Ray could tell that something was not all there with his friend, so he decided to humor Justin regarding that which the latter had brought up before between them.

"So you say you've found another winsome worker, back here?"

"Yeah…yes, my good friend, that's right."

In his fever to maneuver Ray to the position where he wanted him, the Tether completely forgot what his lame story was to get his buddy to go in the first place. Well…he supposed that another possible Terri would make for enough of an impetus.

After all, it was that lady—and the love triangle that he knew erupted around her, Teller, and himself—who started all of this. It was not unlike that noirish late 1980s thriller involving Michelle Pfeiffer having to choose between two slicked-scalped men in Los Angeles.

And Justin was definitely Mel Gibson, and anyone else would agree at this point, although for different reasons (to him, it was because of the sexy; to the average observer, it was because of the crazy). All this lying in wait for Ray to show up would certainly be worth it.

"Would you look at that!"

Justin's face lit up somewhat as he noticed Ray indicating the target spot. It was a lone crate, situated in the center of the back area, with a wire hanging overhead, the cord curiously shaped into some sort of loop large enough for a man's head to fit through.

While Justin, true to his surname, sort of, discovered the terrible tether already set up, it was he who configured the crate.

And it was also he who now produced the nine millimeter with which he held Ray at gunpoint. For certain he was getting into the Gibson character at this point, in all ways.

"Yes…I've seen it before," he answered his friend, who just transitioned from gawking at the incidental noose to staring at the purposeful pistol positioned his way. "In fact, I was responsible…for part of it.

"Oh, don't think that I'm _that_ psycho that I would go out of my way to set up a looping _noose_ or anything…I would be that psycho, though, to implement it with the help of some other…helpful effects."

Ray looked at his friend very, very carefully for a moment, then spoke. "I don't…I don't understand…"

"Don't you _dare_ try to pretend that you haven't known what has been going on," Justin continued, taking another step towards his fellow avatar of undies…whom he hoped would soon be buried so many feet under this plaza, away from anyone's gaze. "_You_ know about it…_I_ know about it…Terri knows, and God knows she set this whole thing in motion! And she prefers you—_you,_ you hairy Honky pasty Bixby fuck.

"But I'm going to take care of all that now." Justin stopped about five feet from Ray. "Now, when she finds out about what has happened to you, she won't have any other alternative but to run into my arms—_me_, who was once shoehorned into the back of that industrial cart! Well, it's gonna be _me_ who'll be in the passen—in the _driver's_ seat, rather, now.

"What do you want," Ray almost whispered, still dumbfounded by his once-associate's sudden one-eighty.

"We're all alone out here, Ray, you know that. And as the one with the gun, you'll do what I tell you. I'm in charge here."

Ray could only shake his head at the evaporation of the mind of his now-former friend…and all because of a girl?

Who never really even came between them?

"I don't know what you mean about Terri…"

"SHUT UP!" Justin returned sharply, motioning with the pistol for Ray to get up on the crate, just underneath the noose. "I know what she said to you, over there, in the Lobby! About the 'Most Hairiest'! I know you're so…irresistible with your shirt off!"

This was semi-sarcasm on the Tether's part; a shirtless Teller was in truth a terrifying thing.

_But what if, in the case of the Baroness of Building, whom Justin adored so, the barebacked Ray was instead…Terri-fying, as in, most arousing, to the young woman?!_ The underwear wackjob couldn't bear to think about it any longer.

"THAT'S IT!" he shouted, all racing rumination now ceasing in his mind. "You are going to get that wire—around your neck—and you will _step_ off the crate, when I say so!"

"Tether…Justin…please, don't do this! Terri didn't say 'Most Hairiest!' She said…'Miss Harris!' Really! She was wishing Willa could be there with her, instead of me! She's totally into that sort of thing, and only that! She doesn't like guys, like you and…"

But the other young man was too far into the cases invented in his mind to hear Ray live up to his own surname and tell him. "Stop it, Stop It, STOP IT!" Justin pointed again with the pistol, most menacingly. "You're going to step off that fricking box now, before I can…"

"Justin, it was Willa—not me! Justin, Willa! JUSTIN, WILLA!" Ray had the accidental noose around his throat at this point, but although it constricted his airway somewhat, it didn't deter his abject screaming for his friend to desist.

"JUSTIN! WILLA!"

Just then Justin was shadowed from behind by an even more frightening figure, one with a gun and rope of his own.

"Justin! Look out! In back of…"

"Don't think I'm falling for that crap!"

"No, I'm SERIOUS! Justin! JUST…"

Without a word, the Tether inadvertently lived up to his last name one last time, as he found himself the victim, courtesy of Officer Seymour Redding, of that fate which he so fervently sought for Ray Teller. Justin could do nothing as the loop lapped over his head and yanked him off his feet and the gun from his hand.

"TETHER!"

Cringing a second against a possible gunshot upon the pistol's impact on the ground, the Teller thought instinctively to loop off the noose and leap off the crate, in pursuit of this crooked…sheriff who now had his misguided friend.

But while the young man readily effected the former, he stopped himself in terms of the latter. If this seeming corrupt lawman could overpower the one who almost spelled Ray's own doom, what chance would the Teller have against the psycho?

No, instead, as the undead finally began to pour into all areas of the Plaza, and as Terri poured out paint and her heart to Willa Harris, the latter pouring occurring at long last, Ray trundled off, most guiltily, with nothing more save a two-by four which more than compensated for what his was packing underneath the product which he and the Tether so eagerly hawked. Justin could do nothing but allow himself to receive the turnabout he deserved at the hands of the deadly deputy who now had him; as the air was exiting his brain to some extent, the once-villain-now-victim pondered tactics in his mind, anything that could make him sound like an innocent hostage should someone decent come along.

And Seymour…? He thought about the eternally American question, one which was bastardized from its subject involving many's religious Lord and Savior to that of a cinematic one.

However, the lunatic lawman permuted the saying in his mind, thinking of the apropos justice he was about to bestow upon this…"Justin" or "Tether" person—and he put the question to himself with this young buck's name subbed in—at least, the name which Seymour had heard the varmint on the crate shout. And for sure, the vaquero would very soon follow through, in the execution of his authority, with the answer to the query:

"What Would Justin Willa Do?"


	8. The Panacea Restaurant

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "THE PANACEA RESTAURANT AND THE PSYCHOSIS RESULTANT"

(PROLOGUE)

After several hours of preparing it, the concoction had nearly reached the point that Antoine had wanted it to attain. Only a bit more extract from his prime subjects, and he should have enough to save everyone in town.

There was still the pudding proof live testimony he needed from a live subject, though, and he was so determined, more than he ever was with anything else in life, to have it.

That aside, the seasoned chef hovered over the cooking pot with a look of mostly immense satisfaction splattered all over his broad, mustachioed face. How fortunate it was that he should stumble upon the fortuitous cure for…turning, as he did some several hours past this day. And to think that it the gift of saving lives came him through an incident during which he almost lost his own.

(CHAPTER ONE)

Just an hour or two after the outbreak, which that mad masked motocrosser undoubtedly touched off, Antoine was sorting out some ingredients and other materials for entrees, to take with him on his way out of dodge. He was almost through, and had just wheeled himself out of the freezer of Cucina Donnacci and around the corner…

…and then the Moose Man's presence, standoffishly right there in front of the cook to make him fall flat onto his back, nearly gave him the coronary that he thought he would get from too much cholesterol all this time. As he gathered himself together on the kitchen tile, Antoine gaped up at the seeming haunt-hulk of a humanoid, a man with the head of a moose, his chest heaving and his arms outstretched vengefully…was this some kind of justice delivered upon the Chef, for all the times he had experimented with dishes of the most exotic of sorts? Yes, Antoine Thomas did moose a few times; yes, he prepared yak dishes, and other unusual delicacies.

The thought had even crossed his mind, on an occasion or two, to perhaps make a meal involving the most dangerous game…but no, that was only for psychopaths and not him. He wasn't into that anymore, now that he was becoming relatively more successful and his life had stabilized beyond all the anxieties he'd had before. Such nerves once drove him to…dine like that, but no longer.

But at any rate, now it was the Moose Man, he was coming to extract vengeance for all of Antoine's culinary crimes thus far, despite any latent conversion from his former deviant consumptions. Would the chef lie there and take it, or would he resist and live to throw together another peculiar platter, another day?

The chef decided on the latter as he scrambled away on his haunches, drawing himself up by way of the centerpiece counter in the kitchen and using the partition to place as much distance between himself and his stalker. There was no sound of nostrils blaring, no cattlelike grunting coming from the Moose as it locked eyes with the cook.

Rather, the sound emitting from the figure was more of an anguished, pathetic, geriatric cry.

With the utmost of resolve, Antoine shakily made to round another corner, so he could get at his chef knife and defend himself. But, after taking his eyes off his foe to focus on the bend, then looking to the right again, he found that the Moose had blocked off that route.

Antoine grabbed for the first thing he could reach…

…and Moose Man struck out with his antlers, the protuberances thrusting into the chef's midsection and throwing him to the ground again.

This time the chef found himself staring straight up at the ceiling when he came to, a second later. He was surprised at this point that his adversary had not already finished him off. Noticing the frying pan hanging over the edge of the counter helped in terms of options.

Antoine looked over at what had tumbled out of his hand, that item which he grasped at the last second…

Just a red, red lobster. Oh, for a weapon, he thought as he could hear the Moose's pathetic carping still, paces away.

And then, just as the humanoid cattle struck out again, aiming to stick Antoine in his back, the cook virtually dove for the pan he espied a few seconds ago, nabbing it and dodging his enemy's attack all at once. He then ducked in and countered with his own thrust, the pan taking Moose Man across his head…and knocking it off its shoulders?

Antoine looked again and saw that the creature's real head was not that of a moose, but rather of an old man, one with very cracked sunglasses and completely whitened eyes behind the shattered frames. He sort of looked like a comic book hero of old—not an actual superhero, but one who wrote of them for decades on end.

The chef thought to himself, for a fleeting second as he looked at the codger_…Stan?!_

No…it couldn't have been Stan "The Man." Just a spitting image.

And now a lunging one, once again. It was all Antoine could do to avoid the geezer as he inexplicably continued to perpetrate antler thrusts without his antlers on, the wizened cranium pushing out at the cook, the teeth in the mouth greenish and gristly with some kind of…flesh.

It was almost metaphorical to Antoine, the man thought as he continued to dodge the oncoming ex-man. Here was a mouth, pushing out at him, wishing to be fed, wishing to be satisfied, not unlike so many of the patrons for whom he prepared what he thought were the community's optimal dishes. But this mouth wasn't looking to feed from Antoine's larder, but on the restauranteur's limbs.

Well, the Chef was used to satisfying those with their gastronomical demands…so he'd figured he'd hold the hulking creature off the old-fashioned way. With an abrupt lunge of his own, Antoine thrust the lobster, still in his pudgy hand, into the contumacious maw of the creature before him.

So while the old thing stood there, his arms now in the air, he somewhat seemingly…incapacitated in some way by the crustacean's being crammed into his mouth, Antoine came back from around the corner a second later with prized chef knife in hand, and he stabbed the stunned "Stan" where he stood. With a hard thud the unperson who was once Noah Hawthorne fell backward onto the slippery kitchen tile, the back end of the lobster still inserted deep into its oral cavity.

The Chef huddled there a moment, heaving heavily, doing all he could to muster his breath once more and figure what to do next. Fortunately for him, it seemed as if many of the monsters out there were not convocating his way this instant, as they were too busy getting their own main course on the concourse, devouring stragglers still trying themselves to reach a better berth than these casino floors in Fortune. Antoine now had to consider his priorities, most saliently how he was going to transport as many ingredients and other supplies out of his establishment…where was that utility cart now…

As Antoine looked out, courtward, in an attempt to try and divine an answer to his inner query, he noticed the most peculiar thing going on in the supine, Stannish Noah-corpse: it now seemed once more Noah than not.

With his trusty frying pan in one hand, and his chef knife in the other, the culinary cad traipsed a bit closer. Yep, it was indeed the case. The face he saw some moments ago, then wracked with the broken veins and bloodshot stare of the no-longer-living-yet-not-deceased, was replaced with a much more normal, peaceful kind of skin tone and glassy, expired look in the eyes.

Antoine had seen the news, had read all the accounts of these outbreaks all over the country. (Really, he was more into Zagat reviews and such, but the occasional undead happening sated his eccentric curiosities as well oftentimes). He had never heard, all this time, of some substance actually re-turning someone to full flesh.

Yes, there was that wacky, quacky Zombrex…but that was only a temporary fix. Like insulin to…

Wait, that was it.

Perhaps it was the lobster. As a diabetic himself, Antoine had studied the origins of the ephemeral panacea that was insulin. It actually came from the pancreas of a dog, and was discovered quite by accident. A real stumbling in the dark…kind of like the fortuitousness of a crustacean interfacing with the choppers of an infected, and a similar cure occurring.

But perhaps this one, unlike the diabetic stave-off, might be one more permanent in nature.

This was indeed something for Antoine to look into, something even for him to concoct. The heck with Umbrella and Phenowhoever; right here in his own sanctum of Cucina Donnacci, Chef Antoine would brew his own cure to the undead affliction.

The cook ignored any unpleasant, long-asleep pangs reviving in his stomach at this point as he set to his new task.

(CHAPTER TWO)

There were several minutes wherein Cinda did all she could not to look out on the turned tourists, out there on the floor of the Food Court. But it was just the incessant moaning, and worse all the shaking and scratching at the vending machines (upon which she just an hour ago climbed to get where she was), that forced her to look again.

From her vantage, up along the catwalks with fellow Shoaltender Jasper, Cinda could see the myriad forms of the undead, so many now that they seemed to start to repeat themselves even down to the tattered clothes worn, as well as the positioning of varied blood-and brainstains. The relentless milling of aimless bodies, she remarked, was not far off in spectacle from the rave-ing underslept who occupied the nightclub at which she and the goateed one next to her had witnessed weekend in and weekend out, until the outbreak struck. It was, admittedly, not unlike a great cinematic prophet's implicit observation made regarding mallgoers (and remade only about a decade ago—remade twice, actually, between a reiteration of what was going on in the filmmaker's vision, as well as what happened in Willamette, Colorado in 2006). In short, whether one considered the mindless in the malls, or the shiftless in the Shoal, it was all the same to Cinda.

She did note that only instants previous, there was one who stood out from the pack, only because he looked the complete imbecile in an unimaginably oversized, moosehead-sort-of cranial attachment. She noted too that, after knocking down a number of the nonliving with the synthetic antlers affixed to his noggin, he charged his way over toward the Cucina Donnacci.

And suddenly, the idea of Cinda Smith herself charging over there—or at least, pushing through to the place, relentlessly against the waves of the once-alive—occurred to her as not the most insane notion one could concoct. It certainly beat starving slowly after a bit more of the coffee and snacks strewn across the faux battlement about which the young woman and Jasper had set up camp.

"No flippin' way," said Jasper disdainfully, once he heard Cinda's plan. "You'll make it to, like, the first railing over there, and then you'll be overtaken."

"I might be…unless, perhaps, you'd care to cover me."

And it was then that the girl finally let leak the idea which she had wished to patent at some point once she had been sure of all the particulars—but there was no time for hemming and hawing now. She went over to a small duffel bag which she'd had on her from time to time, and about which Jasper had always meant to ask her. He had often noted her rustling through it, putting in small solid items and taking out ingredients for drinks. Now he would ascertain in full as she would explain it all in the next few instants.

"Cocktail rockets?!" he asked incredulously, after she was finished.

"That's right." She held up a long, sturdy object, which Jasper recognized as having been one of the longbows that was uselessly at his feet this whole time on their fortification. In addition, there were some cocktail glasses, filled with the nectar of the boozers, seemingly…although it also looked…adulterated with something else. The container was capped off tightly with reinforced duct tape as well, to make a fully enclosed semi-cylinder of sorts. "I figured this would be a neat innovation for some kind of new wave bar where we could 'shoot' shooters and such over to clientele, perhaps through safe, unbreakable plastic containers. (I got that last part of the idea from the canisters you use at those drive-in pneumatic tube jobbers you see at banks as well)."

This last Cinda confided with the back of her hand to the side of her mouth, as if there were really anyone in earshot who was living to hear it.

"Anyways," the young lady continued, "all you have to do is point and launch—get these cock rocks out at the dead ones down there. I filled these ones specifically with a bit of explosive material, culled from gas canisters at the Brathaus next door. So while I'm straggling across the way here, you just find your inner _First Blood Part Two_ and have at these cadavers."

With that, she fit the firing mechanisms for the literal "cocktail shooter" into Jasper's hands. All he did in return was continue to stare at her in disbelief.

And before he could do (or really, not do, with him just standing there) anything more, Cinda was already approaching the Yucatan-approaching end of the battlement, and helping herself off by way of the moaned-at and scratched-up vending machines.

(CHAPTER THREE)

In the ensuing hour or so, Antoine went about further proving to himself the theory that his lobster panacea for the "turned" had indeed held water. Several undead volunteers later, all of whom were duly skewered against the wall with lances from the Hamburger Fiefdom, then force-fed the crustaceans while held in place, had yielded several more corpses which had found re-humanized peace in death. These were gratifying results.

The cook couldn't help but look at the main star of the Fiefdom though—all that beef—and think about another kind of…meat he once cherished so much. His gullet throbbed at the mere thought of it.

But what he was doing now, at any rate, was gratifying—even more so for the fact that the Chef was a religious man (he was no Emanuel Tugman—frankly, Antoine's manias were channeled in another direction entirely), and his rationalization for these graphic trials was that he was restoring the souls of these individuals, helping them get back on the road to heaven…assuming they were headed that way in the first place, before the outbreak. Who knew, after all, given that Fortune City was not too distant a cousin, in mileage or in immorality, from its sibling which was at times nicknamed Sin.

At any rate, Antoine was pleased with his findings. But these subjects could only get him as far as demonstrating that the theory worked.

In order to make a real, corroborated claim to fame, the cook would have to show, through deliberate footage, that a casinogoer's re-turning to humanity was to be credited solely to what came from the inner linings of the lobster. Solely from what Antoine called "Bentholin" (as a variation on "insulin," which was derived from a root for "island"…"benthos" was the term for seabed creatures such as lobsters, a fact which the Chef stumbled upon while prying a bit more into the mythos of one of the foremost players in his restaurant's relative success).

In any case, it wouldn't be enough just to show the ghoul going back to normal by itself; anyone watching might wonder, _What if that undead were treated with some other agent before being imbued with lobster essences?_

No, in order for Antoine to at least get the attention of someone who could help him bring this product to the American masses, the Chef would have to show the entire process from start to finish. He could still resort to lance-kebabing his subjects, for sure, but now the shish would have to start out live, and the entire turning to re-turning cycle would have to be displayed, stage by stage, on tape.

Most likely, too, Antoine would have to do this with multiple live subjects, in order to make his results more reliable.

Well, the cook thought to himself as he threw up his hands, trying to consider all the wrinkles and ways to get around them, Who will be first to submit to the living, then nonliving lobster taste test he had been killing to conduct?

(CHAPTER FOUR)

Cinda was getting along just fine, to Jasper's unmasked surprise, weaving through all the undead on the Food Court floor. She figured that it was probably just from force of habit as, again, that damn Shoal was always overcrowded, and her line of work gave her more than ample opportunity to perfect the art of drunkard- and d-bag-dodging. Most artfully, then, the server wound her way through, whapping at a ghoul in the face here and there with a cafeteria tray, shoving a chair or three in their paths when needed.

She nonetheless waved her hand above her head to give her partner the go-ahead, as she knew he wanted the release so badly anyway.

"I'm yuh worss nightclubbah night-meah," Jasper said, doing his "worss" Stallone as he yanked the bow back, then let the first flaming cocktail volley fly. The resulting projectile pounded out against the ground paces away from Cinda, the glass container smashing dramatically and creating a wall of flame that kept several more monsters from pawing away at Cinda as she pushed ahead. Jasper was, of course, aiming for the creatures themselves, but he couldn't hit the broad side of a Bennie Jack's with his aim.

And as Jasper Sanford hunched down on the battlement to load up another rocket, the other Shoaler just crossed the entrance to the Cucina. Cinda paced in carefully, noting that the specialized muzak in the establishment seemed a bit off, distorted disgustingly, as if it were some sort of paper-thin foreshadowing for danger she was about to face. The young lady ignored it, determined to find sustenance for herself and her coworker.

"Hey there," said a voice behind her suddenly, just as she reached the entrance to the freezer in the back. Cinda spun to see the Chef brandishing a lance most menacingly in her direction. The man just came back from getting more of the oversized skewers from next door. He motioned with the object, directly toward the woman's midsection.

"Why don't you…stick around…just for a little while?"

It was just at that point, when Antoine was considering skewering his first live subject—only the shred of him still there which wished to serve his fare to a human public holding him back—when another incendiary-cocktail-induced explosion sounded, this time against the railing closest to the Chef and the Shoalmistress.

"ROCK-ET WITH YOUR…COCK-…ET!" the two could hear Jasper scream from atop the distant Food Court battlement. The young man was really nothing if not nonsensical, given all the years he gave himself to his dead-end workplace.

By the time Antoine looked up to divine the source of the incoming ordnance, Cinda was already past him and several paces away. The cook had to act fast.

Impulsively, he grabbed up his prized pan and let it fly. The kitchenware ended up striking the young woman not in the back of the head as intended, but rather across the back, still effective in stopping her for just long enough.

Up on the restaurant ramparts across the way, Jasper could get a bare impression of what was going on with his coworker. It wasn't as if he was really about to have the intestinal fortitude to try and get Cinda out of her predicament, in any case. He kind of liked it up here, up on this catwalk with its circumstances of relative calmness and absolute cowardice.

Minutes later, Antoine had Cinda trussed up in the back of the freezer. "Still fixin' to get more subjects, 'fore I begin," he said to himself, the young lady barely conscious or hearing him. "Should prep up my reserves of Bentholin first."

And that was when the Chef went over and fixed up the fryer to go on all cylinders. The fact was that it wasn't boiling water that was in the device, but rather, as Antoine would have it in the course of another hour, a small vat-sized receptacle filled with his crustacean cure-all. He figured it was the ideal place for it, as in the space of an evening he could have an entire barrel's worth purified if brought up to and kept at the right temperature.

As the preparations were brought to a holding pattern, with enough lobster essence in the fryer and Cinda in the back, Antoine set his sights once more toward the source of that "cock-et" noise. It certainly sounded as if it could make for another subject for the chef's menu, er…agenda.

But it didn't seem to Antoine, he thought musingly as he looked up at the young man in the battlement, that it would be anything approaching easy to get that boy in the nightclub monkey suit down from the tree he was in.

"YOU KNOW, YOU'RE WASTING THOSE FINE BEVERAGES!" he shouted up at Jasper, after seeing the remains of glass and tiny umbrellas near to where the last rocket crashed. "YOU SHOULD BE DRINKING TO YOUR OWN FUTILE FATE…YOUR IMMINENT DEATH AND CONSUMPTION!

"HOW DO YOU THINK YOU'LL LIVE UP THERE?!" the Chef finished.

And then Jasper stepped up once more on the edge of his elevated shelter.

"Caysse by caysse," the Shoaler muttered, riffing on the line at the end of the second _First Blood_ feature as the Rambo of the Ramparts let fly another flaming cocktail.

This was Chef Antoine's cue to retreat, and this he did just in time just as the sauce-based salvo struck home at the front of the Donnacci.

He would just have to make do with the subject he had, for now. The girl would suffice for the moment…he would have to go get his camcorder, which he usually used to tape his own ends of interviews with reviewers…whenever they bothered to come, that was.

Which reminded him…where was that reviewer anyway, the one from _Fortune Franchise_?

He figured at this point that what he wanted wasn't a review of his restaurant—hell, he'd liquidate that, for startup funds regarding a company backing his new cure. Now he was interested in a review of the invention, the most serendipitous discovery he had made, lounging about with the lobsters all this time.

Antoine was getting desperate, as well as impatient, given all these circumstances.

And both of these conditions found him really rather famished.

(CHAPTER FIVE)

"Well, my diminutive little dame…" the Chef started, as he started toward Cinda, opening much wider the door to the freezer, intending soon to run off and attract a few undead with some spare…parts he had saved up for a snack later (and good lord were those cravings surging with him again, as more and more anxious he was feeling by the second). "…You just be a good Cucina crasher and wait right here, and I'll go get the other guests to make our meal…complete."

Antoine then started off, making to go for his prized knife on the way.

"Oh," he stopped himself suddenly, "I want you should know, though, what role you'll be playing in my…entrepreneurial agenda for the near future."

An instant later he was approaching Cinda with one of his best, reddest lobsters. "What this small scarlet shellfish is going to do for me and for you…"

"RAAAAASSSHD!"

The cook was almost taken off his feet by the force of the young lady's sneeze. It nearly floored him not unlike the way that that Stan the Man lookalike did with his antlers a bit back.

In his reaction of shock, Antoine had dropped the lobster in his grubby hand; the seafood careened to the floor, skittering a bit nearer to Cinda's feet, then settling.

The girl herself, at seeing this, was anything but settled herself.

"RAAAAASSSHD!" she repeated, with much verbal violence. "RAAAAA…"

Cinda did all she could to stabilize her breathing, but it was to no avail. It was all she could do to get any words out at this point. "…I…Hum'al…hum'all…"

And then Antoine watched as the girl's face turned flush, then even a bit blotchy.

To anyone other than the insane Antoine, the observation made would have been that Cinda was most unfortunately allergic to shellfish, especially the seafood's cerise superstar.

All it looked like to the Chef was that the girl was looking increasingly more…ripe by the second.

"Fresssh," he said, as he went back for his knife, but now with a different purpose in mind. "Yesss, fresh indeed.

"You just wait right heah," he said, the cannibal in him making for a lapse into his terrible native accent, "I gots to get some peppah and regano for dis."

And it was then, at that point, that the reviewer—the science, invention reviewer, who would hopefully approve of his find—had arrived at long last. The guy looked a bit too yellow for Antoine's liking, like a badass banana, at least neck-down to the denims.

(EPILOGUE)

Minutes later, when Antoine found his resting place, face-down in the fryer, again, any ordinary person—here specifically, any outsider to the situation (in other words, anyone other than Antoine himself)—would have just seen someone burned/drowned in his own cooking liquids.

But what Cinda and her fellow C-named survivor, and savior, didn't know was that in actuality, the Chef only died by drowning—because of the Bentholin's purifying qualities, the cook's countenance was preserved indefinitely, submerged in that device.

Sadly, though, with the Chef's death, the honest and effective lobster cure for the animated nonliving had now been submerged, drowned, and—unlike Antoine's face—had itself been effaced from Fortune City, as if no one had ever discovered it.


	9. Promenades and Grenades

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "PROMENADES AND GRENADES: BRANDON'S INTERNAL TURNING"

No trip that the bedraggled-looking Brandon had ever taken, be it countrywide, international, or hallucinogenic, had ever featured quite a sight as the woman standing within arm's reach.

"We need to get through to the people in this arena," he heard her say a few feet from her next to the podium, the meaning of the phrasings falling from her mouth lost on him. She thrust her hands snugly into the deep pockets of her oversized olive jacket. "This is our largest venue yet."

To him the words, regardless of their substantive significance, fell from her lips like sustenance from on high. He didn't know whether to let them continue to rain down upon his incredibly fortunate ears, or stop up their source with his own chapped, blistered mouth.

It was there, at the small stage set up by and for the ragtag nonprofit known as the Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality (better known to chagrined conservative casinogoers as CURE) that the haggard, wayward youngen Brandon Whittaker—a skinny reprobate of responsibility who resembled Nathan Spencer in an alternate reality that involved cannabis overdose instead of steroid abuse—was setting up oratory camp with his commanding officer of public interest, and his secret, hopefully-not-unrequited crush, Stacey Forsythe.

She had asked him to distribute newsletters and pamphlets and such to promenade passersby, all in furtherance of CURE awareness. The mistress of his jaded heart just knew that the people of Nevada could be united once again in the same bodily condition, without fear of deviance regarding cellular animation.

Brandon had the same dream…except his vision of cellular animation uniformity involved the Othello chip collective of his state's populace turning entirely the opposite color.

At any rate, they were situated there, at the wide walkup to Fortune Park—what was known as the Fortune Promenade, just before the main gates adjacent to the casino resort's hotel—and they were just about ready to present their pitch.

"You're…" he started, having trouble getting the words out ordinarily due to his naturally raspy inflection, but especially struggling now before the social organizer of his dreams. "You're…going to go on, soon?" was all he could manage to get out at the moment.

"In about twenty minutes," she said, and went off to get her walkie-talkie. She had to connect with the other CURE cadets to make sure everyone synchronized to get this affair to go off as planned.

Unbeknownst to her, though, the fetching Forsythe lacked the foresight to detect the psychological dissension of the semblance of a man whom she thought was her focused, foremost follower.

Indeed, the at-least-somewhat stalwart Whittaker was committed to serving Stacey, most salaciously in fact. But at the same time, to a fault, he was also given to certain anarchic whims that went beyond the scope of CURE's mission.

Seconds after speaking with his young lady lust, Brandon saw them, that prickly pair on TV who had proven most distasteful. Gus Galliard was strolling around just now with his perennial girl on his arm. Fay Citrine, the blonde who made the barbies that were Lulu Barra and Europa Westinghouse into Garbage Pail Kids by comparison. Those two beautiful bastards served not only as the human model mascots of the resort, what with the advertising campaign featuring their frolicking around the slots, tables, and eateries of Fortune's various plazas and strips—they also stood as strong opposition to the vision of CURE. Sure, they appeared on news broadcasts as "average citizens" as they voiced their ire toward the endeavors of CURE, but everyone knew who they were. Even without their makeup, the public knew them to be two of the main stars of _The Tragic and the Transient_, familiar to all Americans from soon-to-be ATM-hustling business executives to psychotic inbred snipers as the most inane soap opera on television. It was all just an unfunny goof, with the joke most of all being on CURE itself.

Well, Brandon had a soap opera for them, he thought to himself as he watched Gus and Fay wandering around their advert-fabricated romantic romping grounds. A soap opera everyone in Nevada, in fact:

_As the World TURNS—_

"BRANDON!"

He started, turning to receive an unpleasant shake from an impatient Stacey, who was fixing a laserly glare upon him. "You're needed behind the staging area. We're gonna be on soon; I need you to stay with us."

He shuddered as she walked off huffily. How could he ever let her down, even for an instant? He considered following her towards the space behind the stage.

But then the fluffy laugh of that awful blonde sounded in his ears, and Brandon came back to what he believed to be his primary directive at the moment.

The scraggly-maned man-of-sorts meandered over to an amusement-park-appropriate cart near to the Fortune Hotel gates, easily visible to those traversing from strip to strip. He looked at the two innocent balloons attached to the cart and thought of the crystal substances, sweeter than any twin or survivor with a similar name, which he would need to pack into latex later on that day.

It was what was within the midsized canister in the center of the cart that Brandon really required at present. He pulled out a smaller cylinder, a powerful implement made makeshift from a can of green spraypaint.

Stacey had encouraged Brandon before to get creative in spreading the message of CURE around town. She felt that using graffiti was a bit edgy for the nonprofit, but done in moderation and in the right places, it could prove more effective than obnoxious. Brandon, though, was even more creative than the girl who grasped his heart, figuring that an even more powerful green was warranted for the task.

He called the concoction a "green-aid," inspired of course by the name of the homophonically-friendly explosive as well as by Greenpeace, the org as far gone as himself. It was a small home-cooked bomb of a kind, filled with a green substance all right, but it sure wasn't paint.

Rather, something more intimate to the body…something along the lines of what once lined the stomachs of the skulking undead.

It was this vomit-of-ghouls-fueled projectile that he took into hand presently and prepared to throw the way of Gus and Fay.

But before he could begin to hurl the item full of gastric greenness, an even greener item—one much more verdant—flooded into his vision.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Frazzled even more than usual, Brandon shot a glance from the direction of the voice. Surely it couldn't have been Stacey again; she was busying herself backstage more than a misguided has-been diva with an understandably fifty-year-old face and an inexplicably twenty-year-old ass. No, this voice, sounded much higher than that of his boon-to-the-undead benefactress.

He looked over to where he thought the unknown greenery issued, and saw a girl around the same age as he, with a somewhat mannish face but a dynamic sense of style. Brandon wasn't into fashion (I mean, God, are you kidding me?) but this little lady seemed to accessorize so well with that vest …and those boots! Even his stoner self had to admire her way of dress.

"You are hoarding unacceptable quantities of _Fortuna Aspidistra_ here, young sir," the girl began, moving towards the back of Brandon's cart. "This plant is valuable for everything from peaceably artistic designs to simple membership in anyone's household, most importantly mine. I'm sorry, but I shall have to confiscate."

"Whoa," began the bewildered Whittaker as he took her by the arm, finally getting out "Whoa" a second time after a few more moments. "You can't…take these. I…need them…for my own…purposes." And goodness knows he did; Brandon was hoping to combine parts of the plant with extract from an infecting insect known as a knave to create the ultimate hallucinogen of zombie-comprehending mind-alteration. He would finally come to know what it was like inside the undead's minds, what they were thinking and feeling. It would be so enlightening…and such an escape from his emotional turmoil regarding his Stacey, whom he knew did not regard him as hers in return.

And there was such a demand for the drug, too; he knew that there were others who wanted to know all about the inner workings of the recently-renewed-deceased's minds. At least that orange-sweatered, shotgun-stroking Talbat kid he talked to a bit before wanted to know like he himself did.

"I'm sure that all of your…purposes don't amount to anything productive or healthy for these lifeforms," the girl shot back, reaching for an _Aspidistra_ on the cart as she spoke. "And I'm taking these balloons with me as well…I know what people of your ilk store in these, so these aren't safe under your watch either."

Brandon just stood there, shellshocked that this stranger could just up and take away his stock in trade as the short, saucy young woman began to walk away with his goods. He pondered what to do. As sketchy as he was, he could never bring himself to strike out at a girl physically.

At least not with his fists.

He reached around the back of his cart to grab at some of the namesakes for his "green-aids"—yes, the real thing of explosives, which he had also hidden within some of the greenery beyond the small fern with which the vivacious Vikki Taylor had accosted him.

Maliciously he fixed to hurl the much more potent, more lethal explosive Vikki's way—

-When, in the winding back of his throw, the grenade was plucked from his hand by none other than the regent of his libido herself.

Quickly and intrepidly Stacey flung the explosive far across the walkway.

[BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM]

The blast blew everyone off their feet. To Brandon's fleeting delight, Gus and Fay were rocked out of their reverie as their beauteous bodies were bounced unceremoniously to the ground; Vikki too was thrown a few feet and into the somewhat comforting arms of one of the green grassbeds just beyond the Fortune Park gates.

But the childish curmudgeon beyond boyhood years himself (at least in terms of physiology, if not maturity) was also affected, even more immediately, by the discharge…and so was the woman he had wanted so badly. Both presently lay prone or supine, and bleeding on the Promenade's pavestones.

Stacey, as it would turn out, she would be alright in all ways; she knew this even as she lay there gasping and choking on smoke on the ground. She had read somewhere of an old rough riding American president who was attacked before addressing his people, yet stood stalwart thereafter, telling his aides "I will deliver this speech or die." This historical stimulus inspired her; indeed, even after taking on nearly the brunt of a grenade blast, she would dust off herself and her grungy jacket and motion for her megaphone. And for certain, she would arrange it so that the likes of Brandon Whittaker wouldn't be around to further—or have falter—the endeavors of CURE any longer.

The ersatz man who was Brandon Whittaker, on the other hand, wouldn't be the same from this point on. It was all broken to him now—everything from his cart to his heart—as fragmented as the glass cover for the resort directory, which lay in total shambles from the grenade's detonation. He was farther gone now than he was on any kind of trip, whether via displacement or depressant.

Looking into the glare of the longest shard of the shattered directory cover lying not too far away, an even greater explosion hit him. He realized that the means to accomplish his objectives all the way needed to be much more immediate. More personal. More Direct.

And that "_Aspidistra_"-absconding hussy, he determined as he reached for the shard, was going to be his new female fixation—the object of his improved anarchic methods' first practice run.


	10. The Chrystal Exchange

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "THE C(H)RYSTAL EXCHANGE

Standing around in the nook near the restroom stalls and waiting to extend arms of thanks towards a constantly incoming hero just wasn't doing it for her anymore.

For Chrystal Kennedy, the young, stifled girl who had wanted this past week to be her first of many releases from her constricting college years, there needed to be something more fulfilling.

It wasn't enough for "what happened in Fortune City, to stay in Fortune City" to be her mulling around a limited, staid safehouse, awaiting rescue by the same sort of obnoxious neanderthals she'd always avoided in her undergraduate years.

Chrystal wanted more. She wanted to be out there, beyond the confines of her safe space.

In actuality, it was not the case that nothing out of the ordinary occurred in the survivor areas. Following the lead of Chuck Greene, who oftentimes sped into the security-laden realm on gazelle-like legs not hopped up on actual speed but rather on the blender-generated Quickstep, the ordinary citizens and visitors of Fortune also attempted, and often succeeded, in deriving superhuman benefits from the mixture of ordinary substances. Resorting to the coffee pot in the cafeteria rather than any blender on hand, the survivors soon found themselves able to perform pretercurious feats, the likes of which were never imbued within the stragglers of any mundane mall in the Rockies. Through the combination of a cup of joe and whiskey, for example, the apparent innocents soon found themselves able to blink themselves in and out of various survivor chambers. So teleporting all over the safehouse, Chuck, for example, was confounded when he encountered Curtis Ellenton right near the exit vent, telling him "Oh, and be sure to bring back a couple of cartons of milk with you," to thoroughly complement his repulsive baby bonnet costume after asking him just a minute and several other rooms ago in the lower level if he could score some bibs from Stylin'Toddlers.

It got to the point that, towards the beginning of the fourth day there, many survivors were looking nervously around, constantly swinging their attention to the left and to the right of them—not out of concern for dust crumbling down from above, or the inevitable eventuality of the undead breaking through the safehouse's barriers, but rather through an incessant anxiety of being heart-attack-startled by a potential incoming fellow survivor who might just randomly warp in.

Some combined potables yielded other interesting results. Mashing up java and vodka resulted in one's ability to duplicate the self, while taking together some drinkable tar and coffee creamer itself caused a rift in short-term time displacement. As a result, beyond the initial identical cloning of Chuck Greene for "co-op" purposes, other survivors began playing with these last two abilities, making outrageous copies of themselves in an effort to live vicariously through the second (and possibly third and beyond) selves they manufactured—though most of these copied casinodwellers were more fraternal or sororal in appearance to the original than identical—and sending them hours forward or backward over the course of a couple of days to encounter the cycling casino hero Chuck. Tamara Stein, for example, confined by the same mostly monotonous life her cousin Leah led in Colorado, fabricated a comely mermaid to reside within a giant shell in Atlantica. Stuart Holmes realized his newscasting dreams by making an identical self who delivered the on-location megaphoned tirade of Stacey Forsythe. He also created a same self who simply wanted to traverse the same casinoways that Chuck did…but this one was picked off by the most coarse of cowardly, rather inbred snipers on the Strip.

It so happened, though, that amongst all of these clonings and time trippings, the dual happenstance of survivortown Chrystal Kennedy and the infamous Twin Crystal Bailey was merely a coincidence.

Regardless, Chrystal wanted the life of her seemingly ageless and definitively H-less namesake. She didn't want a copy of it…she wanted that _exact_ life.

She wanted to be one of the two stunning near-indistinguishable ladies who ushered in Tyrone King at the commencement and adjournment of her favorite show, Terror Is Reality. Time and again she taped the pay-per-views, all of them, and now sixteen TIRs and bored to tears in the safehouse later, she lay here ruing the fact that she couldn't record the most current reality terror special. The overtly explicit program helped fuel Chrystal's desire to make a break from her otherwise humdrum existence, which indeed hadn't improved since her alighting into this survivor area. Sure, she was glad to still be alive, to not be zombie chow out there…but she nonetheless felt too cooped up.

And Crystal, corporeally too, was what Chrystal had always wanted to be as well. It was only that kind of woman who could score the men she desired. That kind of woman who could turn more heads in an instant than a motivated motorcross maven could crush in an hour. That kind of eye candy who could steal the heart of the object of her fixation…the real "green" rider beyond Chuck Greene…

…Leon Bell. Everyone else watching the TIRs perceived only an oversized mulleted rugrat decked out in verdant hues, but there was something in his bravado, something in his braggadocio which Chrystal couldn't resist. All the other bikers really revved it up during the performance, sure…but Leon was always really on fire, and Chrystal was likewise always on fire for him.

It didn't, however, take a crystal ball to see that there wouldn't be a Chrystal Bell anytime soon…(nor, in the young lady's idle Raccoon City exposé-obsessed thoughts, would she, beyond even getting to meet the brazen biker, have him take her surname and become the next Leon Kennedy).

So in order to get what she wanted, Chrystal would have to change herself. Utterly.

And she knew just the person who could help her.

"Hey there, Boog…I mean, John," she began, approaching and addressing the nerdy, purported proponent of science, checking herself this time not to refer to him by the unflattering last name which everyone else around the survivor area used.

The somewhat-of-a-man who was the object of this address turned quickly, a bit too much so, and faced her, nervously. He knew, but did not know that she knew, that he'd had much of a thing for the young lavender-clad woman since he'd abandoned thoughts of action figures in an impromptu South Plazan plywood fortress, and arrived at the safety area with the hope of actually meeting humans of the…oppositely-gendered persuasion. Chrystal could tell, at any rate—she could see through tens of socially awkwards in undergraduate who seemed to pretend not to care about her presence—and even if she were wrong about it at times, she could determine from this fellow's foundering, spastic stance when she was near that the behavior was all founded on her account.

"Yes, my…yes, Chrystal," he began stutteringly, further confirming the lady's confident beliefs regarding his feelings for her.

"I don't know if you noticed, but your…'concoction combination innovations,' as you are wont to call them, are becoming rather popular around here." Chrystal cleared her throat, prepared to make her pitch. "I know that so many people here are grateful to be able to break the monotony of safehouse life by…blinking about, and…making copies of themselves…"

"I…yes," barely answered the Boog, stammering as was standard for him, "and…that, that's what you want as well? To 'port…or to…pair yourself?"

"Well…I want to make something new of myself, I guess you could say…but not quite a completely separate, second me. I don't know if you've ever watched Terror Is Reality…"

"Yes, yes yes, it can be totally arranged for you, Chrystal," reassured the Boog as he began to usher his crush into the men's bathroom in the Royal Flush Plaza. "If all goes according to my estimations, the Twins should be approaching the critical women's apparel store in Palisades right about this…second."

After discussing with the young, bored stiff survivorette the risks and ramifications of what she wanted—body switching with Crystal Bailey in order to experience firsthand the other woman's ostensibly more exhilarating aura, looks, and lifestyle—these two had neared their end of the means for the execution of the experiment in question.

It was a good thing that Chuck Greene, the motocrosser in amber (not to be confused with the motocross mistress by the name of Amber) had lent the ersatz man of science here his defiler to cover the dangers for the short trip (although personally, John might had modified the weapon in order to enhance the damage quotient by +30).

The plan was this: In order for the body exchange to occur, Boog theorized, Chrystal Kennedy and Crystal Bailey would have to enter the interdimensional cosmos crossroads portal located between a chintzy boutique and a filthy crapper at the exact same moment, each from the end opposite to the other. After that instant, Kennedy's mind would migrate into the bodaciousness of Bailey, and vice versa (although, depending on who you asked, the former was possibly less bodacious than the latter, so this descriptor, at least, didn't necessarily go both ways). It was a premeditated situation of 1980s cinematic proportions that would make Kirk Cameron, Dudley Moore, Fred Savage, Judge Reinhold, George Burns, that farnchy-faced kid who played opposite George Burns in 18 Again (not to be confused with the blasphemy against 18 Again that was 17 Again with perennial douche Zac Efron (and no, the latter was not a prequel)), and anyone else in an eighties body switch movie to stand proud.

In any event, this thesis by John Boog regarding the warp—which was really nothing more than a theory, a hypothesis—would, if proven to be accurate, launch him stratospherically into the more honored annals of pseudoscience.

All he had to do was prove his findings, which he hadn't figured out yet how to do.

Ah well, at least this would graduate him from playing Kaves & Kobolds.

And yet, his fellow Kavedwellers were at the moment indispensable for the success of this touchy operation. Indeed, Brian was back in the safehouse, at the ready with a walkie talkie to call Chuck in case something went wrong! Kevin was at the camera controls alongside Stacey (and striking out with her as well while he was at it), ready to inform John and Chrystal of the "go" moment regarding the key twin on the other end! Curtis was curled up in a downstairs cubbyhole by himself, drinking his troubles away! (With lowfat milk of course…as much as lowfat could really help him).

What was that? How, you ask, were the Twins herded toward their end of the Palisades Merchant Changing Room–Literal Royal FLUSH connector?

To explain further, it basically went something like this.

Within the last few hours or so, Chuck managed to defeat Tyrone King and bring his swindling ass back to the safehouse. In this reality, the Twins never captured Rebecca, nor encountered Chuck at the club, so there was no justifiable homicide of one gorgeous gemini nor consequent suicide of the other. On top of that, the Twins, blissfully gallivanting their way through various plazas on wilding sprees for the sheer hell of it, were never made aware in their throes of pleasure (which they always provided for themselves in abundance) that TK was even brought down, much less taken prisoner.

What the TIR cyclists knew about the Baileys was little; however, they were cognizant of the fact that they occasionally liked to double-team the evil emcee, the Tekester himself, when they were in a mood that was more…heterosocially inclined. But the Tekeasaurus wouldn't make it easy for them. No, Tyrone would, playfully, lead the peripatetic pair along on scavenger hunts of his own design and delight, make them engage in a little "undertime" as he called it, for them to gather clues towards the eventual location of one of many keys he held to his own private inner sanctum of salacious slumber. Kris Bookmiller, the crimson cycler, knew this among the others, and the Kavers inspired the man, goading him towards revenge against the imprisoned impresario of pernicious pay-per-views, to force TK to write a new set of scavenger hunt challenge notes for the Twins to undertake. Wanting to screw over the ladies more than actually screw them (as the bikers all mutually lusted after, yet moreso despised the comely carbon copies), Kris jumped on his red bike as well as his chance to avenge himself and his self-respect. Before long, the Twins, using a secret passage of their own to bypass any straggling undead (which Kris and the other contestants also knew about (okay, so they peeped sometimes, despite their hate)), reached their dressing room to find the fabricated correspondence…and so began a new titillating romp through the plazas to score another chance at a key to TK's…

(I don't have the stomach to write "heart," nor the indecency to write anything else, here).

So there the Twins were now; none of the Kavemen could believe it. On the other end of the interdimensional yet unremarkable portal, Amber and Crystal Bailey were approaching the backmost changing area of the, as amazingly appropriate/ironic enough the store name would be for the latter twin in another minute or so…

…Brand New U.

"It says to find something 'creamy yet cuddling the cement'…" began Crystal to her sister, who was trailing behind by a few paces, "then the next line, '…steamy when you snuggle in my sem…' wait, that doesn't rhyme! That last word doesn't end in a T!"

"Guess he's going for all-out crass this time around," answered Amber, "maybe he's using poetic license nonetheless."

"'Creamy yet cuddling the cement,'" Crystal continued, her eyes wandering to the corners of the sales floor. "Even when we put our heads together, Ambs, we can't think our way around too much—besides deciphering lascivious lust hunts devised by megalomaniac television tyrants, or complex iaido katana katas which only about ten senseis around the country have mastered—but I'm willing to wager that he's talking about shoes here."

There was nothing, explicitly, to make Crystal jump to this conclusion; she always just defaulted into "shoes" as being the answer when she was completely stumped.

Fortunately for Chrystal and the Kavestuds.

"Crysts, you're absolutely right!" shouted Amber in vacuous jocundity as she pointed across the aisle. Scattered all around were pairs of white low heels, which everyone from the foxiest mistress multiples such as the Twins to a store-roaming savage such as Chuck Greene could don and enjoy.

Crystal's face brightened, then: "The clues here otherwise seem to point to the closet in the back as being the place where the key would be!"

"Then there must be another couple of heels in there," figured Amber.

The raven-haired sister neared the closet, then found the shoes in question, placed there by Kris along with the key he'd extorted from TK in the safehouse infirmary. Crystal reached for them, unaware that this seeming mere nook was in reality the unusual (yet quite practical) gateway once revealed by the sunstruck Linette Watkins.

"SILVER STRUMPET IS IN POSITION!" called Kevin to Brian, the latter at the ready with his talkie and the former now receiving several glances of disdain from Stacey Forsythe from hearing such an epithet for even someone like one of the Twins.

Regardless, the clarion call sounded once more, this time by Brian to Boog: "SILVER STRUMPET IS IN POSITION!"

On the other end of that exchange: "Now, Chrystal!" urged John, guiding his infatuatee towards the dingy stall for dudes. "Good luck and GordonDawkinsspeed to you."

A second later, Crystal Bailey stretched for the shoes just as Chrystal Kennedy seized at the s**tter.

"Are you alright now?" asked an unfamiliarly saucy voice to the right.

The first sensation Chrystal had beyond this query was that of a sickeningly bitter substance being somewhat coerced into her mouth.

"Boog…get…" she started, extending her arm out to push away what she knew then to be wine falling onto her tongue.

Then she opened her eyes wider, shuddering a bit from her natural allergic reaction to alcohol…as well as from the unnatural, unsettingly pure beauty of her now unclothed arm.

"Did you call me 'Boob' just now, Crystal?" asked the stunning blonde before her. She was decked out in the most alluring yet simultaneously nondescript of yellow dresses. On her, though, a blanket adorned with cheap thumbtacks could look effing irresistible. Still, the apparent nightwear on the woman was equally tacky (pun intended to the comparison above).

And, looking down, Chrystal could now tell that she was wearing the same, in silver.

"You haven't called me that in years, Baby," began the woman again, whom Chrystal now recognized as Amber Bailey. "You just won't let me live down the boob job I got years back, now will you? We were always identical in every way…except for that."

"Umm…Amb…" Chrystal struggled to get to her feet, to say anything at all, but couldn't. She was still somewhat in a daze from the mind switch—she couldn't believe Boog could pull it off!—and half swooning from the slight bit of alcohol she just took in. Even just the smallest bit could cause an adverse reaction within her.

Regardless, Amber thrust her arm down to give her "sister" a lift up. "But we'll always be tight, me and you, the Booby and the Baby. Now come!"

With a hearty tug or three, Amber finally managed to get her now-somewhat-of-a-sibling to her feet. Crystal stood sturdy for a second, then couldn't help but lean over again, taking to Brand New U's moody mural for support.

"What's wrong with you, Babe?" the bombshell near her said, clutching at Chrystal in an almost invasive way. "What, were those heels tipped with…poison or something? TK must be getting sickly kinky in his old age…"

"No, I'm…I'm fine…Amber," Chrystal quickly returned. A moment or two later, when the wooziness finally faded, wave of overwhelming wonder swept over her.

Now instead of feeling stupefied, she was starstruck.

She was having a conversation with Amber Bailey! One of the great, storied idols of Terror Is Reality!

Then, of course, Chrystal realized the even greater news. What could be better than _talking with_ such a celebrity? She shuffled towards the nearest glass window to try and get a semblance of a glimpse at who…what she was now.

She gazed half amazed and half aghast at the glass. The once-ponytailed, kind of chubby schlub that was Chrystal had now undergone an interdimensional chrysalis change into…this! The skinniness with curves, the flawless fetching face, the Supermanly blue-black hair…she was inside Crystal Bailey!

She _was_ Crystal Bailey. It was unbelievable…and yet a bit unpredictably unnerving...all at once.

"I'm…I'm really Crystal Bailey!" Chrystal couldn't help but blurt out, shaking her unbelievably smooth hands up and down before her.

"Uh…yeah?" returned her now sister, looking at Chrystal incredulously, then gazing past her to the place where Chrystal lay instants earlier. "You must have hit your head when you fell or something." The yellow twin then strode over to the back corner near the warp, and (luckily for John Boog and company) did not inspect the last changing area on the left, but carefully squinted at the opposite corner to make sure that there was no blood or hair anywhere. Nothing looked too serious.

"Come, Baby, let's go tear things up," she finally said afterward. "You'll feel better, I think, if we continue our daily gallivant around Fortune. Nothing should be able to stop us now…after all, you've got the keys and I've got the katanas."

At finishing this, Amber pointed to one of the glass panels near the front of the New U. Propped up against them were a pair of wicked, incredible swords.

Somewhat in kind, a half wicked, half unsure of smile now crept across Chrystal's face. And now she felt the weight of the keys, once inside of the white low heels, inside a slim pocket in her dazzling dress.

"Chop, chop, Baby!" called the gorgeous golden gazelle from over her shoulder as she began to skip towards the store's entrance. "It's not like we have a full seventy-two hours here to spend or anything!"

On the other side, a couple minutes before, John Boog struggled in the Flush's men's room, like Amber did at the U, to get the body of a C(h)rystal to her feet.

And, in a similar way, the girl in question was debilitated with bewilderment for a few moments. Crystal staggered clumsily about, grabbing at thin toilet stall doors to regain her balance and figure out her body.

And when she stumbled before the bathroom's long letterbox of a mirror and looked in…

"!"

Crystal instinctively nabbed a waste container nearby and chucked it at the returning overweight fuchsianess she viewed, breaking the glass a bit.

She then clutched at John Boog himself, attempting to throw _him_ against it next.

Several seconds and fruitless heaves later, though, Crystal found that she didn't quite have the wiry strength she had five minutes earlier.

Nor, upon looking again in the now cracked reflection, did she have the figure, or the face, or the…

She didn't have time to get another thought out as Boog's stealthy needle did its work. The defiler, as it turned out, wasn't the only thing he'd borrowed from Chuck.

Employing a used Zombrex needle out of necessity (yes, it could spread diseases, not excluding the occasioning of "turning"…but these were extenuating circumstances), John managed to stick Crystal with a solution combining Repulse and a liquid sleep aid which Denyce fortuitously took with her from Roy's, just as the motocross maven was taking her from the pharm, in case she might have trouble sleeping where he was taking her. (Boy, it really took a village, with this project…or at least a safehouse).

Silently now, Crystal relented and slumped half to the ground, with John barely catching her before she fell fully. The boy beyond his years looked down at the prone maiden and smiled, somewhat wickedly.

With some effort, the undoubtedly out of shape semi-scientist then shuffled away from the bathroom, shambling along with the body of Chrystal Kennedy occupied by the unconscious mind of Crystal Bailey, back to the survivor area. This, John decided unbeknownst to Chrystal or the Kavers or anyone else, was only the next best thing to what he really wanted.

And he would get what he really wanted in good time.

Chrystal thought she would be ready for everything she would be set to encounter. She figured that the life of a TIR Twin would entail just sitting pretty, looking pretty, acting pretty.

She didn't realize that it could also involve taking out the rage at being constantly objectified on almost every unloving and otherwise inanimate item in sight.

"YAAAGH!" shouted Amber, using her katana to render a once-cared-for, once-CUREd-for ghoul into several pieces. "I'm not going to stop until all the zombies are eradicated from Americana!"

"Amber, you know that's…" Chrystal was starting to say "that's impossible," given the statement she overheard from Chuck earlier that these things basically constantly respawned from some extradimensional woodwork. The human population of Fortune City was once 64,593, but the undead population here seemed to be that times infinity by infinity.

"Nothing's impossible," her "sister" shot back, almost seeming to read her mind (although Amber had no clue as to whose mind it really was inside the body of Crystal Bailey). "I'm gonna wipe out this entire casino so we can be free to cut loose!"

And so Amber continued on with her jagged Japanese blade, swinging about, dismembering, decapitating. "Come on, join in! You know Booby and Baby always do this together!"

_Why does she always call me…I mean, her sister, "Baby"?,_ Chrystal wondered, as she began to make halfhearted attempts to attack zombies nearby. "Unnnh," she grunted, as she began to heft the sword overhead. Then a second later, when her limbs elevated easily above herself, she found that it wouldn't take the exertion she figured it would take after all.

Crystal and Amber didn't have much going on in the book smarts department, but their street smarts, casino smarts, and all other kinds of environmental smarts—and brawn over brains, as diametrically opposed to pitiful Kavedwellers hiding from unlife in the safehouse.

A few tens of once-tenacious and now-trounced monsters later, Chrystal looked up and noticed it. Amber wasn't entirely just cutting loose in any indiscriminate direction.

She was headed for the bar setup in the middle of Americana.

_No…in the name of my intolerable allergies, no…_

Chrystal did all she could to leap dismemberments all about to catch up to her loose cannon of a companion.

It was all Boog could do to thrust the body of Chrystal Kennedy through the airvent. He'd want to involve the word "thrust" somewhere with the girl…but not like this.

And boy, did he want to "thrust" regarding Crystal Bailey ever more so.

Chrystal was right about John; he did indeed want to succeed with the wonderful, if somewhat dullardlike, Lady Kennedy. The diffident scientist part of him wanted that much.

But the more visceral, wilder Boog within—wanted Crystal Bailey…and he wanted all of her.

He was determined to satisfy both needs, all in one blow, through this little project. As tangled as the trick sounded, he'd hoped to please Chrystal first by giving her what she wanted...then later, make himself Crystal's man by saving her from this…little crisis.

He could juggle the C(h)rystals for a while, like he could juggle his Kaves die; it would all be worth it. And he would get Curtis his Jessica, Kevin his Europa, and Brian his Lashawndra all in good time for helping him out with this.

In order to pull all this off, however, he'd have to make his own luck a bit.

And, eying the zombie behind him, which he'd let lurch after him into the airvent basement, he knew just how to initiate all of this.

"All you have to do is lift the liquid to your lips, honey," urged Amber as she prodded Chrystal on to take a sip of beer. "I'm starting out lightweight with you here, 'cause I know you took a bit of a spill at the 'New U. But you have to come around sometime."

How could Chrystal tell her blonde buddy here that she didn't, and even couldn't, drink?

"I don't think, Amber, I don't think I can take this right now," she said, lowering the beverage onto the bar. "I'm still spinning, my head, it's still going around and around after what happened back in Palisades."

"Man…you know, Baby, you have to do the drinking for the both of us. We want to be Booby and Baby again, right? Not Ambler and Gambler…"

Chrystal didn't have an inkling regarding what Amber was talking about, but it was the truth between the Twins. Amber'd developed a bad drinking problem over the years, in an attempt to cope with the stress involved with Terror; in turn, Crystal garnered a gambling addiction in her time in Fortune, and gathered a debt that made ironic, for her personally, the name of this city.

"You know that, after those epithets started popping up," Amber continued, "you would start pulling these levers, and I would start pulling those, so we could each fix the other's joneses." She pointed respectively to the multiple taps behind the bar, and to various limbs of one-armed bandits around Americana.

"Well, I'd rather gamble, for now," began Chrystal, waving the beer away and starting from the bar towards the machines in question.

"NO!" yelled the yellow maiden behind her, yanking Chrystal (well, really, it was Crystal's) arm back hard. Chrystal thought the appendage would pop out of the socket, these Twins were that unbelievably strong. "You're going to drink this…now. Then we'll play games. Of a sort."

When the darker-haired woman glared back at her, Amber said, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll even cut it. Alright? You just have to have this soda…but you have to take it with a bit of vodka."

"Okay." Chrystal still hesitated a bit, but took the sizeable container from Amber's hands once she finished preparing it. When the other woman's back was turned again, Chrystal dumped the contents, then simulated wiping a moistened mouth when Amber faced her again.

"It wasn't bad. In fact, it felt good to take stuff like that in again," she said to the golden gal in front of her.

Amber nodded, then started to take the one she thought was fully her sister by the arm. What Chrystal didn't know was that Amber was doing something furtive behind her back while Chrystal was stealthily jettisoning her drink.

"Come, let's go play some…though not the slots." Amber escorted Chrystal to the glowing ring near the middle of the casino. "You're up this time," she added, pointing to what was known locally as the Thunder.

The somewhat leathery, somewhat metallic bovine torso seemed to do anything but beckon to Chrystal. She looked very much askance at Amber.

"Let's go, now, sis; you wanted to play mostly and not drink, well, you're gonna have to make up for it. Now get on."

Not wishing to anger Amber, Chrystal strode tentatively to the bronco, then straddled it. This alone seemed to satisfy the gold twin to some extent…and Baby could notice that Booby was even more than a little titillated by Chrystal's mounting the simulated semi-animal.

"Ride him, Baby!" shouted Amber as she switched the mechanism on. The ensuing nineteen seconds or so became the wildest romp involving a synthetic partner which Chrystal had ever experienced. Around and around her body thrashed, the woman atop the Thunder clutching for dear existence as she begged some deity up there (and thus betraying her ordinarily atheistic nature) to spare her. It was incredible that she could hang on for even the several instants that she did.

All the while, Amber stood by, caressing her dress, slowly rubbing her thighs with her hands, allowing the most relaxed, ecstatic grin to cross her beauteous countenance. As a twin, she could feel all the excitement that her counterpart did. Being as addicted to intercourse as her sibling, the two spent all their days hedonistically, even arguably nymphomaniacally either actually gratifying themselves in a sexual way or finding substitutes for it the way a person trying to break out of cigarettes chews toothpicks.

Then, in one abrupt instant, Chrystal found herself finally thrown from the Thunder, striking back first against one of the supports of the ring…and Amber went from pleasure to a similar pain in the ensuing instant.

Chrystal struggled to collect herself and hoist up off the ground as Amber huffed over, a murderous scowl of contempt on her face. "The least amount of time you've ever ridden this, at least in the last several years, has been three minutes. I can't believe you."

"It's still the fall I took back in Palisades…_Booby_," Chrystal shot back, spitting the last word as if it were a barbed cuss.

"Crystal, I'm not buying it anymore. You weren't supposed to get off…" Amber said, pointing emphatically at the artificial bronco, "…until I…got off. You know how it works between us."

The brighter-hued Bailey started to head off towards the Royal Flush exit while Chrystal shook her head. Maybe safehouse life was starting to look better to her after all.

Crystal came to in the blandest of rooms, a drab nondescript chamber full of nothing but worn wooden shelving and rusted pipes.

And a bloodthirsty ghoul gunning right for her.

"AGH!" she cried, ordinarily ready to leap to a trusty cutter of a katana, but now noticing that such a tool was not at her disposal at present.

"I'll save you!" shouted an attempt at a bold inflection (though it ended up sounding more petulant than anything) as what appeared to Crystal to be a superhero half out of costume, barreling through the door with Chuck's defiler still in hand. Then waveringly, but effectively, Boog brought the weapon down on the monster's head, crushing it in the process.

Crystal still had her lavender-sleeved arms over her face. She then noticed the clothing, as well as her now-different, heavier body, and spent more attention on this change than any gratitude towards John Boog for intervening.

The latter couldn't believe it. He stared at the girl before him for several seconds. "Well?"

Crystal still gazed in abject dismay at the alien hands in front of her, then: "…Yeah, what?"

"I just saved you! Don't you have anything to say to that?"

She blinked a couple of times, then: "Uh…thanks. I'm sorry, I've been out of…where am I?"

"You're…you're back at the safehouse, my lady," John began again, putting aside Crystal's lack of appreciation and bowing in the most douchey manner. "Sir John Boog, Engineer of the Freedom Spire, at your unending service."

The woman wanted to roll her eyes at this, but she figured she might need to make a friend in this predicament. "Well, thanks again for helping me out just now. I think I have somewhere to get to…"

"I wouldn't recommend your going anywhere in your condition, my dear," said Boog, somewhat condescendingly. "You took a bit of a spill out in…out there…and you need to recover somewhat…engineer's orders!" He couldn't help but laugh a bit at his own pitiful effort at an iota of humor there.

Crystal crinkled her brow at the semi-scientist, then sighed. She wanted to know what the hell was going on with herself, with her true body, wherever the hell that was, and she figured she would get more answers if she stayed put. "Alright; if this body is banged up a bit—and I don't suppose you know anything about exactly what happened to me out there—I'll stick around. For a little while."

"Madam, I believe I know about your current…state of disorientation. You don't feel at all yourself, do you? We can explain. I can explain it best, really…"

"Just, just give me a few minutes. I need to collect myself." Crystal was a bit curt with this last.

John obediently bobbed his head and, with a weak wave of his ludicrously gloved hand, ducked back out into the safehouse hallways. It was a good thing that no one saw him hobble in with the oblivious body of Chrystal Kennedy…not to mention the zombie which shuffled in behind them. Good of Brian to get Sullivan into K&K and Kevin to distract Stacey with his teeth-grinding assays at flirtation long enough for Boog to bring everyone and everything into position.

And there were quite likely more orchestrations of John Boog's to come.

"WHOOOH!" cried Amber as she whirled around and around the tight machinery rows of Slot Ranch, hacking away at an ATM here and there. The cash splashed out of the busted machines by the two-and-a-half-thousandful as the winsome woman slashed here and there with her redoubtable weapon. "Who says you have to gamble in the first place to get your money, Crystal!"

Chrystal hesitated a moment, then volunteered: "I figured that it would be more the fun way to win it, rather than just to take it." She did everything she could to sound more like the one who normally bore the body she now wore.

"Now _that_ sounds like the Baby I know!" Amber flashed a sheeny smile, and Chrystal reflected that the light haired lady looked leagues better with such an expression. Most of the time, though, Chrystal noticed, smiling was just not a Bailey Twins thing; showing teeth more often would have seemed to make them more…human, and they didn't appear to want to have that.

The two rounded a grouping of slot machines when Amber saw something that made her eyes brighten more than any one-armed mechanism possibly could. "Come on, Baby…" she started.

"Let's do the Twist?" Chrystal finished for her, blubbering and almost involuntary. So much for trying to sound suave like Crystal.

Amber flakily chuffed this off: "No, Babe…more like, 'Let's do the Booth.'" She emphasized this last with a point to a rather sizeable green structure before them.

"The Cash Booth? They had one back at Americana…"

"Yeah, but this one's luckier," Amber answered. "Besides, I like to…_distribute_ my fun across the various lairs of Fortune, when I can, variety's the spice and all." As she said "distribute" and all thereafter, she waved her fingers in front of her like an old school rapper who speaks with his hands, and ended up coming off like a trendy collegegoer who attempts to talk hip but ends up sounding overly glib and trite. As if either of these ladies gave off anything in the department of personality to begin with, being the ambulatory trophies that they were.

And Chrystal was beginning to realize this more and more as she traversed the segments of the City with her "new sister." She was thrilled, at least to a degree, to be a Bailey within the first several moments or so…but now she felt a bit sick. Headsick, so to speak, at the rapid fire pace at which all of this was rushing at her—none of which she had really wanted to enjoy after all. Heartsick at the thought that the fulfillment of one of her greatest wishes left her so empty.

Homesick for her old, somewhat chubby but entirely lovely body.

The hell with all those who wanted the Barbies that were Amber and Crystal Bailey. Like that Lulu Barra back at the safehouse, and Rebecca Chang, and Princess Peach, and Tifa Lockhart, and the chick from Mass Effect 2 who looked like Michael Jackson, and any incarnation of Lara Croft (yes, she had a rough-and-tumble makeover, but as far as Chrystal was concerned Lara would always be an intimate-fluid-receptacle and nothing more)—all of those exaggerated simulacra of femalehood would eternally be far off the mark from what men should want and what women should aspire to be.

While one lascivious Twin twirled in the throes of airborne dollar bills, the other Bailey barreled towards her own leisurely bailiwick, somewhat…earning the money a bit more, if only technically. Within the apparently innocent frame of a slightly overweight, pastel-clad survivor was actually a reality television fixture literally trying to break out. As the Crystal within the Chrystal strode secretly towards the machine marked Cash Diet, she figured that at least her in-some-ways better half Amber was not around to chide her for indulging in her favorite, vice-filled pastime.

"Come on, come on," said Crystal as she jerked at the stationary bandit, which made off with some of her cash (well, really it was Chrystal's cash, so what loss was it to her). Several minutes later, one could still find Crystal yanking away at the same mechanism, expecting a different result again and again like the clichéd definition of insanity…

And, sure enough, one in particular indeed did find her.

Just as Crystal was reaching for the ultimately unsatisfying lever once more…

"WHOAWHAT?" she cried, startled, as Boog warped in right next to her.

She dove first for cover, not knowing what it was that had just blinked in…then she reached for a nearby golden stand, hoisting it high overhead as the other, emerging person watched, then cowered in fear before her. Obviously Crystal wasn't yet attuned to the fact that survivors could indeed just teleport in and out of existence within the safehouse confines.

In stark contrast, Boog was not only aware of the phenomenon—he had engineered it, with his tinkering around the survivor coffee mechanism—and he had since perfected interspacial bodily transport to the point that he could maneuver to the exact points he wanted just by thought.

Basically, the safehouse belonged to him, with this ability.

Despite this, though, he still submitted to the awesome power and beauty that was wielded by Crystal Bailey, the greatest object of his…idealist fixations, who now held the gold stand threateningly against him. What Chuck and others who spoke with him didn't know was that amongst John's most prized action figures were those of the TIR hostesses themselves. Not unlike wrestling superstar molls like Miss Elizabeth and Sable, the Baileys too had dolls to complement their own doll-like existence, making the overly-perversely-poseable items microcosms of the real thing…both the toys and the live women were manipulable plastic, in essence.

But Crystal wasn't about to become John Boog's possession.

Looking down at the prone, pathetic survivor, she lowered the auric object she held in abject pity. "I…I can't…_stand_ you," she said (pun most certainly intended, by her as well as by yours truly).

Boog ceased shaking enough to be able to talk at last. "I…I only wanted to direct you to a machine that might work better for you," he volunteered. Crystal raised an eyebrow warily.

"L-L-Lucky Lapdance," Boog managed to get out. "It's over in another room. Let me have the honor of escorting you."

"I think I can handle things from here," the woman said, her pink and purple sleeve waving in John's face to move him away.

She left him simmering in the musty storage, but John didn't count himself out. He would yet become the big time bigamist spouse of Chrystal Kennedy-Boog and Crystal Bailey-Boog.

Elsecasino, as Chrystal watched Amber standing in the now-activated money booth, casting her arms heavenward to allow bills upon bills to float up her dress, enveloping herself in a synthetic cyclone of dirty currency, the realistically-designed woman within the false silicate frame wanted to smash the cheap thrill of a machine with the wheelchair which lay nearby.

_She's probably enjoying the sensation of dollars entering her intimate areas without having men's hands stick the bills there,_ Chrystal figured.

Actually, if she'd asked Amber, she would have indeed received that exact response.

Until Amber completed her virtually coital transaction with the cash, Chrystal just rested against a slot machine, casually disemboweling any dead who approached her. For a fleeting moment she didn't wish for her mind to migrate back to the safehouse, as her physically inferior real body wouldn't have such strength, nor the access to a katana anyway, to similarly service the "Kavedwellers" who regularly, awkwardly came to fail at flirting with her in a comparably shambling way.

"Alright I'm done," said the other finally a few moments later, padding out of the green monstrosity. The score next to the booth, of course, read the minimum score; it wasn't as if Amber were actively trying to put her hands on any of the airborne dough. She pointed back at the machine. "I'm not even going to bother asking if you want to partake, 'cause I know you're feeling off-kilter. I'll tell you what, though: I'm really feelin' the idea of going to our premier spot…you know, our…intimate meeting place…"

Mostly depleted by this point, Chrystal just looked at her blankly.

"You're tired, I can tell. It's a shame, though…we really should go there…you know, your favorite five-letter 'S' word…"

Amber's plain jane correspondent just sniffed and shrugged. She looked sheepishly at the woman, then said the first thing that came to her mind, which was her own favorite five-letter "S"-ey hangout.

"Space." It was Chrystal's favorite, to be honest. Sure, the apparel was tacky—but that was the point. It was supposed to be ironically "in," like people in the 1990s who wore t-shirts with candy bar or detergent company names on them. (Please tell me that was the style for just in the nineties…I'd have to shoot myself otherwise.)

This was met with the most plastic-looking of sneers. "…Sss_pace_?" Amber dragged out, pausing pregnantly therafter. Then finally: "Okay…you're not my sister."

Despite being worn out, at this Chrystal looked up and stood stock. Amber was a flaky ass emeffer, but she was crazy too. And dangerous with a serrated sword that she more than knew how to use.

"All this time, at least since you fell at Palisades, you've been acting so…how shall I say it? So…un…Crystal-ine. You muffed up at the Thunder, you wouldn't do the Booth just now (and I knew you wouldn't, that's why I didn't even care to ask)…what is with you this evening?"

"Morning," corrected Chrystal. It was, in fact, around Zombrex Time for insatiable seven-year- old Inafune freaks at this point.

"God, and yeah, listen to yourself! If you were in your right mind, you, like me, wouldn't give a crap about what time of day it was. We're living high and large here, Crystal, we're gonna be here forever, all party and pretty and it'll never run out! Don't ruin what the gods of greed have given us here. We're gonna rule this wayward roost longer than Wayne Newton or Siegfried and Tigerfood ever performed at Vegas."

This last phrasing was unforgivably tasteless, yes, but this is Amber Bailey we're talking about.

Said Amber now took Chrystal by the hand and hurried her past the moving sidewalk byways that led to the Food Court. "Let's go. I'm gonna take you to the five-letter-S-land—and yes, I'm talking about _Shoal_—and we're gonna pump you so full of voddy that my Crystalline Baby'll come back to herself in no time."

The other "twin" wanted to resist, but internally vacillating between the exhausting and soul-sucking experience of vapid wilding, and the enervating and soul-sucking experience of wasting away in a safehouse and swatting away horny nerds, Chrystal finally decided to give the former one more try. What did she have to lose, after all…beyond more of her dignity and decency.

"TK!"

"Mmm…uhhh…"

"Teke!" raised again Crystal's soft cry, as the involuntarily-disguised Twin rustled the shoulder of the captive Tyrone King in the safehouse's sick bay. "Wake up! We have to get out of here."

"Now…now just who the f**k are you?" Tyrone, like anyone else who wasn't aware of the C(h)rystal switch, didn't know about the true whereabouts of the brunette Bailey's mind. To the tyrannical Terror host, this was just some crazed fan trying to impress him or something.

Although it didn't hurt, he figured on second thought, that someone was trying to free him right now, after all.

(The truth was, too, that if Chrystal Kennedy were in her right mind—or her right body, as it were—and she had seen TK in the safehouse infirmary before the switch, she herself would also probably have tried to free the man, given her mania for his show. As such, it didn't really matter whose mind was in charge of the pink and purple person trying to revive Tyrone at present).

"Listen, it's me! Crystal—Crystal Bailey! You have to believe me! You…"

"Lady, you couldn't even come close to being my Crystalline with all the plastic surgery in the Capcomverse. Get the living eff out of here, before I ring for…security." He said this last with 100% pure uncut sanctimoniousness.

The fact of the matter was, TK decided, if he was gonna be freed, he would have someone stylish do it (he wished it would "really" be Crystal Bailey and not this…seeming delusional fan before him)…or otherwise he'd have to do it himself. No way was he literally going out like this.

"Look, I can prove it. Our scavenger hunts…your hiding the keys all over the casinos…"

"Who the goddamn told you about that?" TK shot back intractably. "My intimate snippets being scattered all over Fortune City! I swear, when I get back to them Twinny hos, there's gonna be some real hell to pay!"

While Crystal was trying to summon more proof, she looked over her shoulder, to make sure she wasn't being seen.

She was.

And who else was watching but…

"Boog," she said, under her breath at the lurking presence wringing his hands from behind the infirmary window, the woman knowing his name by now due to his infamy around the safehouse.

"'Boo' yo'self, honey," Tyrone said, settling more than ever back into his bed, "you ain't scarin' me none."

"So those stick ponies…" Chrystal then said, pointing to two overly suggestive junior-equestrian objects saddled across the lap of her companion, "I suppose they're for something equally…risqué, as well."

Amber looked at her supposed sibling askance while they reclined in the black-light and effervescent fluorescentness that was the nightclub Shoal. "Nooooo," she returned, drawing out the word with a bit of spite.

Lights danced all around the pair as they settled into a corner of the club. Trendily awful music piped through to complete the scene. For some this would be a player's paradise, a fornication fiend's fantasy. Between these women particularly, that made only one of them.

"These aren't for that," said the phosphorescent fox before Chrystal. " Although I guess I could see you seeing that in me. Don't you remember my telling you, though; they're for Ember and Umber."

"Oh." Chrystal didn't dare add anything to that monosyllabic rejoinder.

The other trained her eye on the ponyless person before her for a few beats, thinking, then she continued. "You know how it is, raising twins and all."

"Yes, yes, I've always told you, I could only imagine," improvised Chrystal.

The erstwhile survivor knew at this point she was treading water conversationally, and looked all around desperately at the ephemeral flashiness she could see. Always she longed to be in such hot spots…her plainness proscribed this throughout her dreary existence. She wanted now, though, to be the farthest from here, this hell of hedonism, this…Sheol that was Shoal.

As Chrystal was looking longingly towards the now-closed door of Shoal: "Baby…"

"Yes?" answered the innocent, turning back around to...

…receive a knock in the face from a clone of the skinniest horse in the Capcomverse.

"I don't have twins."

Amber loomed frighteningly, crazily now over the prone body of Crystal and the mind of Chrystal, much more alarmingly with a wooden toy than the Twin's counterpart ever could with a metal stand. "You must have forgotten…my third child!"

Chrystal barely had time to duck away as the business end of Amber's brandished stick pony found purchase in the glossy floor where the first girl once lay.

"How could you forget my third child, Crystal!" shouted Amber, as she began to circle Chrystal menacingly. "Forget Ombre, the one whom YOU NAMED, after a card game while you were in the thick of your gambling addiction!

"I have TRIPLETS! How could you not remember!

"Unless you're not REALLY Crystal Bailey…"

Chrystal dove with all she had across the dance floor now, looking for anything she could to defend herself. All she saw were trays and beer bottles.

A long, thin thing then clunked against the seat nearest to her.

"I'll give you a fair chance, imposter," said Amber as she approached closer, eying the pony she just threw Chrystal's way. "It won't matter, anyway; I'll gratify myself beating you senseless!"

As if there were anything that _wouldn't_ gratify or pique Amber in that way.

The lusty lady came even closer, ready for her second favorite kind of physicality.

Crystal needed to regroup. Having paced away tensely from the sly, slimy Kavedweller, she wandered aimlessly for a bit, waiting for him to warp in her way at any second. Was there anywhere she could go?

Ray Sullivan sure wasn't about to allow her. In fact, the man of false security now seemed to recline against the airvent's opening at the edge of the safehouse, as if trying to bodily block anyone else from coming in. When Chuck came out of the camera room where Stacey, Katey, and the homicidal yet lovable Snowflake resided, Ray would have to move again…but he sat pretty across the exit for now.

And TK was evidently not going to be any help, either. Wouldn't even give her time to demonstrate who she really was within.

Who knew that Crystal would ever have to rely on who she was on the inside? Neither she nor Amber ever had to transact from beneath the surface of what they were.

As she pondered this in another room, searching for other alternatives to escape the machinations of a sexually famished and absolutely dangerous gaming nerd, this spoken-of-devil alighted into the air.

But this time he didn't blink in alone.

"They've copied her somehow…the pharm folks did this…DIDN'T THEY?" demanded Amber, wondering about all the capabilities of TK's ominous benefactors as she stabbed out again at Chrystal with her long wooden warrior. The latter, meanwhile, blocked deftly with her own impromptu pony weapon. Chrystal was finally starting to get used to her supermodel skin and all of the concomitant body's abilities. She still wondered fleetingly if it would save her now, nonetheless.

She gave back as good as she got, matching Amber's thrusts with her own parries and attempting some of her own, the blonde and black-haired pair at this point seeming to be the dueling Ken and Ryu, respectively, of game-show-hostess-hood. The two tore up the dance floor to a literal extent as Amber flipped, Chrystal flounced, Amber dived, Chrystal dashed, Amber slashed, Chrystal struck…and shattered her evil opponent's equus in two.

Chrystal was about to position her horse under the chin of her body's counterpart when suddenly Amber rolled backward, shrugging lightly as she stood up. She then whisked her hands behind her, then put them forth once more, now holding, unbelievably, another stick pony, fully intact.

"You also must not be aware about how very many slot items I have, phony," the yellow yahoo said. "How those drug geeks copied Crystal I'll never know…not unless I _slug_ it out of you."

The other woman was growing weary of this; she didn't derive any such euphoria from this fight as did Amber. She decided that she wanted to end this…and as such she decided, as her namesake and mindswap counterpart would do compulsively on many occasions, to up the ante.

"You're so tacky, you know that…Booby?" the saner woman taunted.

"Don't you DARE call me that, you imitating, impersonating TWIT." Amber began to lunge forward anew as Chrystal began to back up carefully against a pillar near to her.

"And you're so much the more genuine a person? That's a laugh. Going for two-bit idiots like TK…you could have better. You could have someone more real. You could BE someone more real!"

"You don't know anything about genuine or real, you pharmaceutical test tube…Baby," spat Amber as she thrust again and again against her opponent, who blocked each advance.

"You could have a good man…like Leon Bell," Chrystal went on, readying herself for a move which she hoped Crystal's body could handle. (She allowed herself a split second thought about how proud she was to assert the name of her own crush, too).

"Motormullet? Are you f**king kidding me?" Between her rage and this new incredulity, Amber had really lost her fighting edge. Sloppily she went for an overhead strike…

…just as Chrystal tossed her horse aside, ducked down and slid straight through the spread legs (make of that what you will; I'm kind of worn out on innuendos right now) of her erogenous enemy. Before Amber could turn around, Chrystal rose to her feet and slammed the horrifying hostess against the pillar, pinning her there with all her strength.

"My name is Chrystal Kennedy," she said, after a triumphant instant, "and I'm more woman than you or your s**ty silver sister will ever be."

"If I alone am not man enough for you," said the brazen John Boog, ordinarily quite pathetic but now terrifying with three other Kavers crowded behind him in a claustrophobic room, "perhaps a cadre of the cuatro of us will be."

The back of the geeks were to the only exit of the room…and Crystal's back was to the opposite wall. Between this miserable fact and the traumatizingly corny pun Boog just uttered, the woman was enervated to the point of passing out obliviously. But she had to stay on her feet.

"You wouldn't dream of touching me," she said defiantly, "not in a safehouse full of survivors."

"Oh, what they don't know…or they can't hear, anyway…won't affect them any," replied the now boorish, now brutish Boog, his gloved hands grasping the air in the most unsettling, molesting of ways. "The sound mufflers Kevin and Brian created from amplifiers and stuffed animals in the safehouse loading bay assures us all of that."

The dawning realization shocked Crystal into silence. Not only had these dreadful dorks managed to ape Chuck's drink mixing abilities through the coffee pot…they somehow absorbed his talent to "tape it." And now would she be the one to die (thus completing the tacky DR2 catch phrase)?

"Yep, my brother Kavers proofed this room all around while you were in here considering the Capcomverse. You might have wondered what took me…took us so long to 'port in. Well, there's your answer. We were…busy."

Crystal started in stark horror at the terrible quartet bearing down on her. Even this one non-blonde, in her able, supple true Twin body, couldn't take on four non-undeads at once…let alone take them on in this more debilitated frame of Chrystal Kennedy.

"And now, we're gonna go from being busy…to getting busy. We don't like a struggle…so Curtis…please administer the…ceremonial libation, if you will."

The aforenamed overgrown infant drew closer to a never-felt-so-doomed-in-her-existence Crystal, the former holding out a long black container before him. She and her sister had made for a ménage before…now it looked as if she would know what a fivesome would feel like.

Once confident against the seemingly thwarted Amber Bailey, Chrystal soon found herself thrown to the ground once more, as the blonde twin rammed her elbow into the other's ribs, then took her opponent down to the floor.

"Here's what we're gonna do," she said, flipping wild strands of hair back from her face as she straddled her legs across the supine Chrystal (again, I'm sick of being sick by this point, use your imagination). She drew a hand behind herself again and pulled out another item. "You're gonna drink this, and in your oncoming stupor you're gonna finally tell me fully who you are and who you're from."

Amber was holding out a long, black container before her—the special drink she'd prepared behind Chrystal's back while the latter was disposing of her own drink as Amber wasn't looking. Chrystal eyed the drink, then gritted her teeth as she eyed the yellow peril above. "And if I don't?"

"Then you're gonna take those," Amber replied, motioning with her head toward another couple of objects in an adjacent corner, "and…get creative with them."

She was motioning towards a can of whipped cream and a lava lamp in particular.

"You'll take them into yourself—with one helping the other, of course—and, naturally, I'll watch. I'll sabotage you just like you sabotaged the real Crystal. And then I'll make you drink my little concoction anyway, even if I have to…get creative with that, too."

Chrystal waved weakly for Amber to give her the drink, and she took a long, long sip. At this point she didn't even care anymore about an allergic seizure; by this far gone it would probably be her divine release from this dreary, crushing casino existence.

At the same moment, the baby that was Curtis Ellerton was force-feeding his special drink upon the Baby who was Crystal Bailey.

_Ahh, Randomizer mixed with Energizer,_ thought John Boog triumphantly as he stood by, he and his crummy cronies' undersexed bodies at the ready. These four had quadruplehandedly beaten out Randy Tugman to be the most frightening virgin(s) this side of Fortune City.

It turned out that Chuck did indeed take John to real live girls after all; he might have wanted things to go down a bit more…voluntarily, but he had to take what he could get (and for all his time in the safehouse, it wasn't much of anything. Everyone from Erica to Esther turned him down).

With a debilitating drink such as the one he and his awful allies created, no victim could awaken for a hundred hours after imbibing…and by then, the military would have moved in, and Chrystal Kennedy's body would have been forgotten. Who really even noticed the lavender lady anyhow, he thought. She really didn't stand out in any way—not in the way that the Twins did, at any rate.

No, Crystal within Chrystal wouldn't have a chance…

…of course not, John figured…

…unless the other Chrystal were taking a Randomizer at the exact same moment.

And the unpredictable drink, especially coupled with Chrystal's unique allergy, caused some kind of body-switch reversion.

But that was silly, he thought. The odds of that occurring were a zillion of zombies to one.

And besides…his goggles and gloves gave him +10 against unlikely occurrences.

As it happened, Crystal took her obsidian offering at the exact same second as Chrystal did hers.

"Wha…wh—_Boog?_"

Just as the sickening scum that was the owner of that name began hovering over her, Chrystal Kennedy—now back, full y restored in her regular body—looked at the four poor excuses for people standing by, realized that she was back where she belonged, and began to breathe a relieved sigh.

"Ch…Chrystal?" said back the bastard that was Boog. It wasn't _that_ she'd said it—he knew that even Crystal knew of his cursed surname-based familiarity around the safehouse—it was the _way_ she'd said it. So much more in a natural way. As if she had been uttering it for more than mere moments…

Then the reverted girl looked a bit longer at the survivors around her...and it came to her that her immediately new surroundings might prove to be something markedly worse than the "Sheol" she had just occupied.

"Break down that goddamn door, Gordon!"

The attention of all five within the room was suddenly diverted. No one who was present could hear the exact statement uttered just now, the room as sound-buffered as it was…but it was if the entirety of the safehouse remainder was on the other side, waiting to burst forth.

All the coffee blends and amateur tape-its of John Boog couldn't save him or his fellow Kaver klatch from the wrath of Lashawndra Dawkins.

"Lashawndra heard one of these geeks say 'Shawndra' all amorously to himself and such…and no one takes Lashawndra's name in vain like that!"

"Now, tell me who you are," Amber said again, this time meaning business with a katana in place of any faux pony, holding the sharpest of objects against her sister's body's throat.

It turned out that by now, it was also her sister's body's mind which encountered this as well.

"Amber, it's me…"

"Nah, 'me''s not good enough," said the other, pressing the blade a bit more intently against Crystal's throat. "You said something about 'Kennedy,' I want to know what that's all about."

"Amber..." Crystal's mind raced. This was the second time in so many moments she'd had to prove who she was. It was maddening; how to bring out her inner self, as it mattered once more…

"Your triplets. Ember, Umber, Ombre," she said finally.

"Parroting back the three children I just told you about minutes ago won't help you," gritted the other woman, almost ready for what she thought was the clone of her twin's body to lose her head.

"FIRE AND RAIN!"

"Wh… what?"

"Fire and rain…—fire and rain," Crystal said again nervously, then once more decisively. "If I can't conjure something from inside me, then I can conjure something from between ourselves. Our father and mother…we're the mulatto children of Philip and Laura Bailey. We never told anyone in Fortune City, Amber, you know that…not even TK."

The blonde twin fixed steel eyes upon the other…then relented, lifting up her katana an inch. "No. We didn't. That's a secret that wouldn't leak easily. Not even TK—especially not him."

They both knew how much Tyrone had hated old school R&B and 3-D action adventures featuring vampiric busty heroines.

"And you know me, Amber…I'm Baby Bailey, born seconds behind you…you called me that because you're the older one…at least in a technical sense."

At this Amber finally lifted the sword from Crystal's throat. "Alright, it's you," she said, satisfied, then took a step forward, pulled her sister up from the ground as she did after the last body switch in Palisades, and hugged her heartily.

"Welcome back," she said, almost wanting to cry into Crystal's crystal-hued dress.

Crystal said nothing, but returned the embrace for a few moments. Then she disengaged and walked toward another katana in the club—a spare hidden from behind a pillar.

Amber looked quizzically at her sister. "You all…okay there, Crys?"

"No…in fact, no, I'm not," said the opposing Twin. She looked in the direction of Royal Plaza and sneered. Then she held her katana before her rigidly, away from Amber.

"Booby," said Crystal, feeling inspired to call her sister by that interesting name although she herself had not done so in so long, "we've got things to do. I've found where TK is after all…and we Twins have a set of ugly fraternal queer quadruplets with whom we…or at least I…have unfinished business."


	11. The Teddy or the Tiger

MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "THE TED(DY) OR THE TIGER"

The lights…the lights were all I could…all I could see…a bit later…

That Yellow Man…he called me slow.

Slow!

_NOBODY CALLS ME SLOW!_

But I felt so…so slow…moving so slow after he beat me…down…

…

I could make out these…little fiery lights, coming from the end of those looooonnng sticks on the ground near me…those were the first things I could rec…rec…reckanize. I made my way to my feet a bit after that…the pretty windows were all smashed around. No meet left for me or Kitty either.

Kitty!

_K-K-KITTY!_

Where did that Yellow Man take Kitty?

I heard…heard him say something about a savehouse…he said it to my best frend, well, person frend other than Kitty…he told Lenny. He's my frend, but I don't know if he thinks the same for me.

The Yellow Man…he's yellow too 'cause he's chicken, and needed those gluffs with nives on them to fight me…(how did he make ten nives from one? Some duc…duck tape he has…must have some kind of imagical powers).

I got up after a little bit later, and pushed my way through the Even Slower People. I like the Even Slower People 'cause they don't make fun of me, or call me slow.

…Heck, if they…if they made fun of me for slow, I would go and make fun of them back! Even more! Hah, hah!

Some of the Even Slower People try to grab onto me, but I just shoot them off with my little gun or I push them away with the big fork I found near the lighty sticks. …I feed Kitty with that fork sometimes. Plaaane in the hangar, Kitty!

_KITTY!_

I had to find 'er.

I kept 'scusing myself past the Even Slowers, and climbed up the big squarey triangle to the place where I keep my bigger gun. It's a real gradeup, that gun. I like that gun so much that I call it my LMG, or Likest Mostest Gun. Thaaat's what it stands for! Nothin' else. So in case you always wanted to know, that's what it means.

I had to punnish some of the Even Slowers with some shots from my Likest Mostest, 'cause they were all getting too pushy. Too bitey and grabby-like. I eventually crashed through the door to the Food Places, and made even more pretty windows bust wiiide open, hee, hee, hee!

Still I had a lot more shots in my gradeup gun…I'm what they call a Cyclepass, so I can't run out of shots…you know? I tried to make friends with other Cyclepasses, before all the other Even Slowers came over…but they all spoke too fast for me, and they were ugly anyway. Even that lady who looked like she had a face of a ten-and-ten-and-ten-and-ten-and-ten-and-ten-years- old lady, but she has the heiny of a ten-and-ten-years-old girl.

I kept going through the Food Places with my Likest Mostest, and stepped along to the shiny gizmos next door past it.

I hope Kitty, where she is, is not hungry. I hope I can hurry my way over to her in time.

I'll find her, and we'll get some meet together. I wanted her to have me, but I guess she's really picky and stuff.

That Yellow Man should do just fine anyways and I'm sure he's still in the savehouse, with maybe other people meets for my Kitty.

(Scene Transition)

"Daddy, what's going on?" cried a very somewhat-manageable, mostly-insufferable child to her father a few feet away as the latter was doing all he could to fend off some once-living with the business end of a giant blue trash can.

"Daddy can't talk too much right now, hon; give him a second." Chuck summarily disposed of the undead grappler by slamming the open end of the garbage receptacle over its head, then drop-kicking the occupied upright trash can against the far wall.

There would have to be a number of repeat performances of that trick, apparently; there were about sixty or more creatures mobbed and breaking through the sliding safehouse gate, all itchy for the tasty survivors cooped up in their secure rooms. The humans could teleport all around the safe zone, apparently—but they still weren't about to get away from the monsters.

"Da-ddy…" whined Katey insistently, tugging at her father's denim leg, then pointing at the most unwelcome of undead-on-arrivals, "they can't come in here."

Chuck nodded down at his daughter, appreciative of her seeming concern for them both.

"They're gonna break up the creamer party I'm having with my stuffed animals!"

Then the motocross maven looked up and saw the synthetic, pastel cattle arranged all around a coffee table, with varied cream-and-black-dappled containers perched all around, and knew better.

He took his daughter aside. "Look, Kateykins, Daddy's gonna have to take you from your friends for a little while, while we get away from the…"

"NO!" Katey protested, stamping her foot on the ground. She then thrust her tiny, grabby hand out at the precious pink elephant and the purple donkey. "They're gonna get Dumbo Dubya Bush! AND Da-Donk Obama! We have to res-cue…and as'cort them to safety!"

"We're not ES-corting those…things anywhere, Ka…"

"_DADDY!_" The girl's features were fully fixed into fuss mode now.

Outside, an undead was playing a most gruesome game of "Mercy" with Kris Bookmiller. The red biker was winning, but just barely.

Chuck thought about the spool and the other tools we would need to secure in the coming minutes, to save tens of lives…but of course, the little Plaza Princess had to come before all that.

Katey clicked her tongue absently behind her father minutes later as he jauntily huffed the preceding President Pachyderm, then the sitting President Pack Animal, promptly out of what was now the little girl's lair of spoiledness. Meanwhile, Kris unfortunately lost the Mercy contest and was being most exquisitely dined upon.

(Scene Transition)

Howdy looked at me like I was doing real good. He had his hand held real high, and I tried to give him five but he woodn't give it back to me. I guess I hafta work harder, then. Well, that and he had some of the green tishews in his hand anyway.

I like him, with his big hat he wears and his soot. I wish I could have nice close like that, but I get stuck with undies on my back. He always stands there near the green closet, with more green tishews on the floor. There are a lot of green tishews all over the place now, here and there and there…all over! All this running with my feet has made my nose run too…think I'll have a tishew myself. They're all green, which is like they've been used, but I'm not really picky.

[SNAAARRRFFF]

There, that's better. I'm so tired, in fact, I'm now on a little truck they use for all the juices they serve here. …I tried to have a juice myself a month ago but it made my tummy feel not so good. The juice I drank ended up on the floor! I think Kitty laughed when it came back up out of my mouth.

But here I am now, using the crap stick from a table nearby to pull my way along on the truck…the Even Slower People are really nice, letting me use their necks for me to grab hold with the stick to pull myself along.

(Scene Transition)

It was another several minutes more of wrestling with the undead, wrestling with survivors gone completely and irretrievably frantic, wrestling with the demands of an insatiable child.

"Thanks for the chocolate milk, Chuck; my red-garbed motocrossing ass wouldn't have made it to another TIR event if you hadn't helped me out and given me this inimitable panacea."

"I can't believe I wasted another six-iron on one of these…former people. But at least I'm still alive…and I know I haven't lost my swing, that's for sure!"

"Daddy, I can't believe you left My Creary behind! DADDY!"

It was just a fugue of voices whirpooling around Chuck, as the survivors who made it through the impromptu safehouse invasion all huddled for warmth among the other living on the Royal Flush rooftop. The nice thing was that most of the people talking were offering words of thanks and blessings.

There was one individual, though, to whom this did not apply.

"I'll go back down there to do another sweep for survivors, honey, but I'm not going into the surveillance room to get your stupid bear! We got the stick pony and all the other semi-animals and things out…that should be enough!"

Katey only replied with a firebombing-caliber frown against her selfless, saintly father.

"Look, I'm going down again, 'cause I think like Jack and Trixie and all are still doing the poker thing down in one of the off-to-the-side rooms. I'll see if I can get him out then.

"My Creary…God."

Chuck said this last to himself as he scamped ever so gingerly back down the stairs to the inner safehouse keep once more. Katey loved The Walking Dead on cable (even after Still Creek, for some bizarre reason), and named the Freedom Bear Chuck gave her after the "Bear" who composed the show's theme. She was a kid with a creative, goofy imagination, and the bear was hers, so old Freedom became "My Creary" instead.

The motocross master succeeded in recovering the poker pals from the safehouse, and started on back with them to the rooftop…but of course, he had to take that side trip to surveillance.

And the green presence that greeted him there loomed far worse than any DR2 Ending D horror.

(Scene Transition)

Kitty, I'm coming…

I'm coming…if I have to take every stupid set of wheals I see in order to get to you…

The drink cart broke back around the Roy's, so I had to keep pushing along on my feet for a while…I reached the Spore Trants and I found my old buddy Mankin and his girl, still standing there by the pretty glass! I said, Hey Mankin, When you gonna take your girl goffing at that rainge back there? But he's still mad at me and won't talk at all.

I got mad too so I decided to get him and teach him a thing. Even though I heard his girl get all mad three, I waved her off and told her I'd be right back with him. So now I'm using Mankin like a padel, just padeling my way in my tilty cart through all the Slowers. They don't like it and they gavver around my cart, looking like everyone does at me like I'm slow and I'm _NOT FREAKING SLOW!_ I'm showing them anyway, 'cause I'm moving threw and passed them all.

I wanna get a noospaper from the stand over there and show all these Slowers that I'm not dumb…even though I really can't read. I just want people to not think I'm so darn slow.

I go around the stand on the other side 'cause there's another cart that broke down…there's a lot of blood and male all over the place. The guy who once drove that thing prolly thought I was slow too. Well, WHO'S LAGGEN BEHINE NOW?

So many times…so many times I wanted to drive his cart all around. Not even like the spore car near the Roy's 'cause that's too fast for me even.

Almose to the dubble doors…I know Kitty's still hungry, 'cause she never stops eating. I hope she swallowed the whole savehouse by now.

(Scene Transition)

"What the unliving…"

Chuck was witness to a host of horrors since his time in Fortune City, but nothing so bizarre reared its head as that which he viewed in the safehouse surveillance. Thank goodness Jack and Trix were safely away and off to the rooftop, and not here to see what was to emerge.

The survivors had cleared all items remotely worthy of being called "possessions" during the undead invasion—all save one, that was: Katey's giant teddy-cum-LMG, yes, the one known only as "My Creary." Chuck had hoped that all the gas waftings he knew were taking over the once-safe area wouldn't have ruined the item. Although he could have, of course, just found another bear, as well as another full-metal-jacket-spewing automatic killing machine out there in the plazas, and could have of course combined them to make another lovable bear toy for his single-digit-aged daughter, Chuck knew that Katey would see through the substitute, and he wouldn't be her "Creary." She was quite attached to things, even if there existed fungible copies of them.

But, in any case, it would be more than a bit difficult to get Katey's "Creary" to go with him—considering that the gas stifling the surveillance chamber had somehow transmogrified the teddy into a rabidly gritting grizzly—much more frighteningly baring its teeth than after its initial duct-tape-and-red-headband transformation. What Chuck saw in the room now was still the same size as the usufruct ursine entity that he knew of before—it just now had a ferocity that made the demonized teddy in Hunter: The Reckoning look like an effing Ruxpin doll in contrast.

The motocross minister of mayhem loaded up his own snowball launcher from his item slots, in an attempt to literally cool the bear's anger—but the thing had already leapt out at him and crashed completely through the camera chamber's glass window.

With a surging wave of unbelievable ferocity, the now-Freakish Bear tackled Chuck, having left its LMG back in his gassy confines. The semi-synthetic beast was content "only" with the plan of grabbing at the casino hero and having the skin of his throat in its hand seconds later.

It raised its clawed paws high to strike vindictively downward. Quickly Chuck pulsed through his item slots, pulling up a pair of scissors he grabbed absently from the camera room during the spool/generator/barrel door-shut. Instinctively he brought the cheap shears up, spearing Freakish Bear in the paw and making him roil back in abject agony.

It then brought the other, functional paw high to strike, aiming to take off Chuck's head entirely.

(Scene Transition)

Now I'm still padeling right along…I got Mankin's head caught in a bucket on one stroak, and now he has like an Oriental Sammerize's hat on it looks like as I'm moving him and stuff! I always noo Mankin was a tough guy…he always has to show me up and all.

Like, now there's some more dubble doars in frunna me. And they won't move, and like I have to leen forwore with Mankin and try to like push in it. Sammerize Mank won't do nothing so I have to freakin get out, or at least saway up and put all my strenf in it.

Come, on, POOSH!

POOSH!

I woan let Kitty have a noo masser! I woan lose my best frend! Like Mankin is nice but he hates me sometimes, and like Kitty is always there when I need her!

I'll show that Yellow Man how weppins are really used in this place.

POOSH!

Ugh…[CRASH CR-CRASSSHHH]

(Scene Transition)

My tilty broke down after a few more minnits, and Mankin died too when we all tumbled down the stairs after the cart. I was tired after it, tired and hurting and I wanted for Kitty to come and kiss it all away. She would really do that sometimes, like, she would nussle up to me and make me feel love for once. Now who the heck knows what underserving idiot has her. I have to get her back to me.

At this minnit I was crawling across the basemint floor near to the savehouse pipes…there was a green air coming up all around me, like as if all the tishews near Howdy and other places here breethed all together at the same time and shot their stuffs out. The green air kind of made me feel silly when I breethed it in…but it gave me some sort of energee too. I thawt I could get to my feet again a second, though I stumbled and fell again. I could see the pipes to the savehouse and I hoped it could fit me in…I figgered that if Kitty could scratch her way through than I could too…

I feel like meet going through a tummy as I manidge to make it into the pipes. This is like the meet I give to Kitty…I'll make so much more meet for her when I find the Yellow Man…

(Scene Transition)

It appeared that Freakish Bear was going to beat the rather slow psychopath to the punch of mauling Chuck Greene, though.

The frighteningly-transformed toy was fully upon the hero, maiming Chuck mightily with its good paw. He took swipe after swipe, knowing that his energy was only down about halfway but wondering where his opening could possibly lie, as Creary's attacks were rather relentless.

Just then Chuck espied a small glimmer of hope in the corner of his eye. It was enough for him to enter the correct sequence of button presses in his mind to shove aside the massive weight of the ursine abomination atop him and run to his sanitary salvation.

"I have been wanting to do this to one of Kateykins's toys for the past couple of days now," he said, taking the garbage bag he caught sight of seconds ago and letting Freakish Creary have it full in his fierce kisser. "You're trash now, buddy!" Hey, it wasn't like knife gloves, but it was something at least. The flimsy sack burst open upon impact, scattering all sorts of refuse over the floor of the safehouse.

The bear, merely annoyed by all of this, charged again at Chuck. This time, however, the latter gingerly dove away, rolling when he hit the ground and grabbing the spoiled hamburger which tumbled out of the garbage an instant ago. Rushing up to Creary, he thrust the terrible sandwich in its terrible maw. He then booked it as the bear barfed much of its stuffing all over the grimy ground.

_Why wasn't anyone upstairs hearing all of this ruckus,_ Chuck wondered as he prepared himself for another attack. This was worse than any psychopath battle he encountered yet.

As he reached over for a two by four, he found that it wasn't everyone who hadn't heard.

"YOU LEAVE MY SWAGGER DADDY ALONE, YOU STUPID BEAR!"

Chuck was all sorts of upset at hearing the sound that just assaulted his ears, and infinitely more aghast when he turned to see Katey, astride Snowflake, they bounding across to join the battle, the little girl brandishing her stick pony menacingly. _Swagger Daddy?_ said the pestering voice in the back of Chuck's head. Is that like a Sugar Daddy? _Is that all she sees me as…?_

"Oh, no, honey, you need to get upstairs," he started as he struck the distracted Creary across the back of the head with the big stick he picked up from before. He then got out of the way as Snowflake jumped in his direction, though the tiger was aiming for the synthetic bear, and struck its mark when the two beasts ended up as a scuffling ball rolling down the safehouse.

"But I need you, Daddy." She looked at Chuck with the puppiest doggiest of eyes. The motocrosser didn't really know what she needed him for, regarding emotional support or something more banal, and he didn't want to think it out right now. "You and the, like, _swag_ you…I mean…"

He looked at her, read her uberprecocious face, and frowned. All he could say to himself at the moment was that the key word for the survivor who was Katey Greene didn't involve the word "Fulfillment," but rather "Disownment."

(Scene Transition)

It was a real comfy fit for me as I was goin through the pipes…I figgered I hadda cut down on some of those stakes I ate with Kitty at times. Maybe if she ate off my fat some like, I could be skinny like the Yellow Man. Anyways I could hear her at the other end of the pipe, her growling and all…and this other annoying little girl voice, whiny and pouty like she's spoilt milk.

Whatever. If my baby's in trouble, I'll let them all have it…Mankin won't have died, and his wife become a window, in vane.

I'm'a make my way through the rest of this and they're all gonna see me get my vengines. Gonna drive all over them with my spearet of vengines. I've got my vengines all revved up and ready for 'em alright…

(Scene Transition)

"Oh, sweet little ingrate, look OUT!"

Now Chuck dove in the direction of his daughter as he tackled Katey to the ground. The space where she stood a second ago was then occupied by a still-tangling Snowflake and Freakish Creary. One rolled over the other, then vice versa as each went for the other's throat. Eventually the latter became the unfortunate victor of the moment as the bear whapped the tiger clean across the face with his better paw, sending Snowflake against the larger safehouse door. The great cat crumpled as she struck the buckling partition.

Creary then turned to catch a full face of two-by-four from Chuck. The bear was staggered as the motocrosser bashed away at the giant thing, but then it eventually caught one blow from the big stick just as it was weakening, and grabbed Chuck with its good paw. Raising him high in the air, Freakish Creary gritted in triumph, then chucked Chuck a good distance down the safehouse hall.

Now all there was left to do was turn on the little miserable mistress the bear had, the one who gave him that stupid, unbearable name (pun very much intended)…

…but Creary turned once more only to be caught once more by a blindsiding attack, one which no one could foresee.

In the brief time that the Greenes had occupied Fortune City, Papa Greene had learned to improvise ingeniously, combining all sorts of matter into weapons with the help of duct tape and awful generic metal music.

Unbeknownst to everyone else, he had a successor in the making who was more than a chip off the old Chuck.

[ssssssssssCCCRUNNNCHHH]

Creary was thrown viciously backward, right back into the surveillance chamber, as the duct- taped extinguisher-cum-generator—now rocket of concussive force—punched right into the toy terror's solar plexus. Katey jumped up in the fetid safehouse air, her arms semi-akimbo and her mouth dumbly open like an old-school Mega Man, as she relished in her triumph.

The sly little spoiled one then set off to tend after her father.

A minute later, though, amidst all the rubble of safehouse surveillance, the most horrible invasive presence the supposedly secure zone knew had once again risen to its terrible ursine feet.

The overly freakish My Creary was still ticking, its claws clicking, it teeth gnashing, its LMG cocked and ready to blast away at its prime target…

Katey and Chuck both started and turned in shock at the sound of the rapidly-reporting gunfire.

Their gaze shot over to where the bear was standing, looming over Snowflake…

Looming…

…then falling, thundering to the safehouse floor.

The tiger, finding strength in seeing her original owner and love once more, collected herself and ran over to him, the latter filing the just-fired Likest Mostest back into his item slots.

"KITTY I LOVE YOU! YOU'RE ALL I CARE ABOUT! LET'S BLOW THIS SAVEHOUSE!"

Katey, now Kittyless, looked forlorn for an instant as she saw the two survivors leave…then let it go. She was still reeling from the shock, as was Chuck, they hardly able to take in what just happened.

Especially with what happened with the cat and her owner…

For once, for an incident involving Snowflake's overly protective caretaker…

…it all happened so _fast_.


End file.
